If you thought watching snooker on a black and white TV was hard, imagine what it’s like for a doctor trying to spot cancer in the brain. So it’s a great step forward that researchers have worked out how to make MRI scans in colour.

At the moment the medical scans come only in black and white and use magnetic ‘contrast agents’ to improve the image. Obviously you can colour them in afterward with the hi-tech equivalent of a box of crayons but this isn’t hugely helpful.

However, in this week’s Nature Gary Zabow and colleagues in the US detail new contrast agents that can be tuned to produce different signals on an MRI scan by changing their shape. These agents could also be modified to ‘tag’ particular cells or tissues (research paper, press release).

“Once you put things in different colors, you can get a lot of different information out than you can in black and white,” Zabow told Reuters. “You might imagine having a normal cell in blue and a cancer cell in red. You can track those cells in the body and see how they behave.”

In a News & Views piece accompanying the research Richard Bowtell of the University of Nottingham, notes there is some way to go before these particles can be used in humans. “If these functionalities can be realized in living systems,” he says, “the resulting multispectral, physiologically sensitive contrast would add real colour to MRI’s bright future.”

Chien Ho, director of the Pittsburgh NMR Center for Biomedical Research, told Science News, “it’s a very innovative paper”, although he notes the team’s current proof-of-concept uses toxic metal nickel. Safer metals could also be used to create similar contrast agents, says Zabow.

Image: the new magnetic contrast agents / G. Zabow, NIST/NIH