Berkeley Lab -- A new technique in Magnetic Resonance Imaging dubbed “Hyper-SAGE” has the potential to detect ultra low concentrations of clincal targets, such as lung and other cancers. Development of Hyper-SAGE was led by one of the world’s foremost authorities on MRI technology, Alexander Pines, a chemist who holds joint appointments with the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and the University of California, Berkeley. The key to this technique is xenon gas that has been zapped with laser light to “hyperpolarize” the spins of its atomic nuclei so that most are pointing in the same direction.
