MRS to CEST & What Is In-Between
Combined Educational & Scientific Session

ORGANIZERS: Lucio Frydman, Elena Vinogradov

Monday, 13 May 2019

Skill Level: Intermediate

Session Number: M-03

Overview
MRS and CEST provide two complementary windows to detect and quantify molecular species in their native tissue environments. Few tools provide a comparable degree of information at near no cost of invasiveness. Still, the methods provide different, often complementary but sometimes disagreeing, pictures on the molecular status. The present session seeks to lay out the bases of both molecular imaging approaches, their unique strengths and weaknesses, and provide a state-of-the-art outlook on the new opportunities that each of them provides for furthering biological understanding and clinical diagnosis.

Target Audience
Basic researchers, biologists, clinicians, molecular imaging trainees, and experts.

Educational Objectives
As a result of attending this course, participants should be able to:
- Identify the strengths and weaknesses of MRS and CEST for imaging molecules in vivo: sensitivity, resolution, imaging compatibility;
- Describe the main applications of each of these methods for biological research and clinical applications, including their ability to quantify various parameters (concentrations, exchange rates, pH); and
- Recognize the origin of conflicting pictures arising from both sets of tools when.