Living With Cystic Fibrosis

What if a scan could do more than show you a picture, what if it could tell you a story about what’s happening inside a child’s body, in real time?That’s exactly what Dr. Chris Flask is working to make possible.Dr. Flask is a Professor of Radiology, Biomedical Engineering, and Pediatrics at Case Western Reserve University and University Hospitals of Cleveland. He’s at the forefront of an exciting transformation in medical imaging, one that could change the way we care for children with rare genetic diseases like cystic fibrosis (CF) and polycystic kidney disease (PKD).“Our goal is to turn imaging, instead of just image creation, into data,” says Dr. Flask. “We want to create numbers. So we can say, this is what’s going on in the lungs. And when we put these patients on modulator therapies, we can see a 10 percent improvement in their lung disease. And similar responses in the pancreas, the liver, and the gut. That’s our goal—quantifying it through this fingerprinting methodology.”This approach, MRI fingerprin