Self-organizing Map Analysis for Understanding Comprehensive Relationships between Formulation Variables, State of Water, and the Physical Stability of Pharmaceutical Emulsions.

The physical stability of pharmaceutical emulsions is an important quality attribute to be considered. To obtain a better understanding of this issue, this study investigated the contribution of the state of water to the physical stability of pharmaceutical emulsions. The key technology to evaluate the state of water was magnetic resonance imaging (MRI).

Feasibility of deep-inspiration breath-hold PET/CT with short-time acquisition: detectability for pulmonary lesions compared with respiratory-gated PET/CT.

Objectives: Deep-inspiration breath-hold (DIBH) PET/CT with short-time acquisition and respiratory-gated (RG) PET/CT are performed for pulmonary lesions to reduce the respiratory motion artifacts, and to obtain more accurate standardized uptake value (SUV). DIBH PET/CT demonstrates significant advantages in terms of rapid examination, good quality of CT images and low radiation exposure. On the other hand, the image quality of DIBH PET is generally inferior to that of RG PET because of short-time acquisition resulting in poor signal-to-noise ratio.

Non-destructive monitoring of creaming of oil-in-water emulsion-based formulations using magnetic resonance imaging.

A non-destructive method for monitoring creaming of emulsion-based formulations is in great demand because it allows us to understand fully their instability mechanisms. This study was aimed at demonstrating the usefulness of magnetic resonance (MR) techniques, including MR imaging (MRI) and MR spectroscopy (MRS), for evaluating the physicochemical stability of emulsion-based formulations. Emulsions that are applicable as the base of practical skin creams were used as test samples.