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Magnetic Resonance Imaging of Primary Lymphoedema: a Tool for Diagnosis and Evaluating Treatment

Funder BHF Charity-funded
Recipient organisation St George's, University of London
Funding £292K
Period Apr 2025 — Mar 2028

In plain English

AI plain-English summary

Around 250 million people worldwide have lymphoedema, yet many wait years for a diagnosis because the standard imaging technique—lymphoscintigraphy—is limited and exposes patients to radiation. The problem is that doctors can only diagnose lymphoedema after ruling out everything else, leaving the condition unmanaged while it worsens. The researchers have already shown that MRI can reveal differences in lymphatic vessels between patients with different types of primary lymphoedema, offering a safer and more detailed alternative. But studying the vessels alone gives an incomplete picture. This project will develop MRI to simultaneously image lymphatic vessels, blood vessels, and the soft tissues affected by lymphoedema. The team will determine how these differences relate to patient outcomes after therapy. If successful, MRI could become a standard tool for diagnosing lymphoedema faster and monitoring how well treatments work—replacing guesswork with clear images that guide clinical decisions. For patients, this means shorter waits for a diagnosis and treatments tailored to their specific lymphatic and tissue changes, rather than a one-size-fits-all approach.

View original technical description
Overview: We aim to enable improvements in the care of lymphoedema patients. We will build on our previous discoveries of altered lymphatic vasculature, and optimise MRI tools to investigate soft tissue changes, to better study and characterise the legs of people with primary lymphoedema. Importance: Despite 250 million cases worldwide, methods for investigating lymphoedema remain limited. Patients can wait years for a diagnosis, often coming after everything else has been ruled out. This is not only frustrating for patients, but means their condition goes unmanaged. We have begun to show differences in lymphatic vessels in patients with different types of lymphoedema using MRI, a safer and more detailed alternative to the standard clinical technique (lymphoscintigraphy). Though these images can help clinicians make a specific diagnosis, studying the lymphatic vessels alone provides an incomplete picture of the condition. Project: We will further develop MRI to enable study of the lymphatic and blood vessels and the soft tissues affected by lymphoedema. We will determine differences in primary lymphoedema patients using MRI and investigate how these differences affect lymphoedema therapy outcomes. Impact: This research will highlight how MRI can help diagnose and monitor disease, leading to faster diagnosis and improved treatment and management.

View the original record at the funder ↗

Researchers

Franklyn Howe (EPMC Awardee)

Related Research

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Original classification

None

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