ISMRM 24th Annual Meeting & Exhibition • 07-13 May 2016 • Singapore

Sunrise Educational Session: Beyond Traditional Brain Quantitative Metrics

Skill Level: Intermediate to Advanced

Organizers: Thomas K. F. Foo, Ph.D. & N. Jon Shah, Ph.D.

Thursday 12 May 2016

Overview
This course is designed for physicists and engineers to provide an introduction to new or emerging MR methods and applications that are gaining interest. The session provides a description of the underlying physics principles, image acquisition and reconstruction methods, pitfalls and challenges associated with quantitative imaging of the brain beyond the standard measures of apparent diffusion coefficient (ADC) and fractional anisotropy (FA). The clinical potential of advanced quantitative measures (such as kurtosis, neurite density, orientation dispersion, etc.) will be discussed.

Target Audience
Those with an interest in: 1) understanding principles of extracting more advanced quantitative metrics for brain imaging based in water diffusion, including the dependance on the diffusion acquisition methods; 2) understanding the image processing pipeline that is needed to generate the quantitative parametric maps, and 3) understanding the clinical relevance and potential of the advanced quantitative measures in the brain (e.g., assessment of traumatic brain injury, multiple sclerosis, etc.).

Educational Objectives
Upon completion of this course, participants should be able to:

  • Understand and implement the appropriate and optimum image acquisition method in order to acquire quantitative metrics in the brain beyond FA and ADC maps;
  • Implement an image processing pipeline to generate advanced brain quantitative metrics (such as kurtosis, neurite density, orientation dispersion, etc.) from diffusion acquisitions; and
  • Better understand and appreciate the added information of advanced brain quantitative metrics as it relates to neurological and neuropsychiatric applications in the brain, such as TBI, MS, dementia.

PROGRAM
Moderators: Nikola Stikov, Ek Tan
07:00
 
Advanced Brain Quantitative Metrics -- Description, Overview & Method
Dmitry S. Novikov1
1Center for Biomedical Imaging, Department of Radiology, NYU School of Medicine, New York, NY, United States
I will systematize brain diffusion models and their assumptions, according to the length scales they are meant to probe. I will mainly focus on the two major avenues for probing brain microstructure: (i) approximating the diffusion signal as a sum of multiple Gaussian components, with the major challenge being in the parameter estimation; (ii) lifting the Gaussian diffusion assumption, corresponding to the time-dependent effects in diffusion, due to structurally disordered neuronal tissue geometry at the micrometer scale. I will also give an outlook on the future research directions which can open exciting possibilities for developing markers of pathology. 

 
07:25
 
Advanced Brain Quantitative Metrics - Clinical Potential & Relevance
Peter Basser1
1NICHD, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, MD, United States
07:50
 
Adjournment & Meet the Teachers
         
 

The International Society for Magnetic Resonance in Medicine is accredited by the Accreditation Council for
Continuing Medical Education to provide continuing medical education for physicians.