Metabolic MR imaging – how to achieve robustness in an in vivo situation (Zaiss, UK Erlangen, MPI Tübingen))
Title: Metabolic MR imaging – how to achieve robustness in an in vivo situation.
Speaker: Dr. Moritz Zaiss (UK Erlangen, MPI Tübungen)
Abstract: Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) measures the distribution of water molecules in the human body. At ultra-high magnetic fields so called saturation transfer MRI allows the indirect detection of other protons than of water and therefore a metabolic or molecular MRI. This allows to aim for 3D maps of interesting markers such as metabolite distribution or pH in human tissue. These are of interest for detection of different pathologies and their stage. However, saturation transfer effects sizes are small, different effects overlap and multi-parametric evaluation is tricky in in vivo systems, where magnetic fields are inhomogeneous, brains are different, and even the motion of the subjects affects our data. Our attempts to handle these fluctuations to get a robust and reproducible MRI are discussed.