BY ELENA KLEBAN
For this month, we discuss the importance of timescale in NMR experiments with Donghan “Mo” Yang, Joseph “Joe” Ackerman, and Joel Garbow. Their work examines the pre-exchange lifetime using ‘brains on beads’ – a delicate in vitro system of neuronal cells grown on polymer beads. In addition to this marvel, we also consider the accuracy of Joe’s premonition regarding MRI.
March Cover Art
Simultaneous mapping of metabolites and individual macromolecular components via ultra-short acquisition delay 1H MRSI in the brain at 7T, by Michal Považan, Bernhard Strasser, Gilbert Hangel, Eva Heckova, Stephan Gruber, Siegfried Trattnig and Wolfgang Bogner
March Editor’s Picks
Intracellular water preexchange lifetime in neurons and astrocytes, by Donghan M. Yang, James E. Huettner, G. Larry Bretthorst, Jeffrey J. Neil, Joel R. Garbow and Joseph J.H. Ackerman
Audioslides
Quantitative susceptibility mapping: Report from the 2016 reconstruction challenge, by Christian Langkammer, Ferdinand Schweser, Karin Shmueli, Christian Kames, Xu Li, Li Guo, Carlos Milovic, Jinsuh Kim, Hongjiang Wei, Kristian Bredies, Sagar Buch, Yihao Guo, Zhe Liu, Jakob Meineke, Alexander Rauscher, José P. Marques and Berkin Bilgic
Audioslides: coming soon!
BY RYAN TOPFER
Having spent over a decade developing MR hardware, the Zaitsev group in Freiburg has tried their hand at “basically everything but the magnet itself.” Lacking the Big Budget of industry, they favor a different approach to innovation: creating “strange things” with the “means at hand.” Sebastian and Maxim here discuss one of the fruits of this design philosophy: their 84-channel gradient system.
Febryary Cover Art
Dynamic 1H imaging of hyperpolarized [1-13C]lactate in vivo using a reverse INEPT experiment, by Jiazheng Wang, Felix Kreis, Alan J. Wright, Richard L. Hesketh, Malcolm H. Levitt and Kevin M. Brindle
February Editor’s Picks
Development and implementation of an 84-channel matrix gradient coil, by Sebastian Littin, Feng Jia, Kelvin J. Layton, Stefan Kroboth, Huijun Yu, Jürgen Hennig and Maxim Zaitsev
Audioslides
A comparison of optimization algorithms for localized in vivo B0 shimming, by Sahar Nassirpour, Paul Chang, Ariane Fillmer and Anke Henning
BY TANGUY DUVAL
Kawin Setsompop and Larry Wald are old friends of MRM Highlights, and their work has been prominently featured in our magazines (here, here and here). In their most recent MRM paper, they complement their simultaneous multi-slice (SMS) acquisition with an additional 3D RF-encoding for each 3mm slice (or thin slab), in order to push the resolution of diffusion imaging to 600 µm isotropic in the brain. This technique nicely solves the issue of phase corruption in multi-shot MRI acquisition.
In their paper entitled “Multishot echo-planar MREIT for fast imaging of conductivity, current density, and electric field distributions”, Drs. Munish Chauhan and Rosalind Sadleir propose an accelerated technique to image electrical conductivity based on MRI. Their goal is not only to image conductivity of biological tissues, but more ambitiously to map neural activity using this fast technique. Let’s hear their story behind the paper.
In vivo MRI of the human finger at 7 T, by Elmar Laistler, Barbara Dymerska, Jürgen Sieg, Sigrun Goluch, Roberta Frass-Kriegl, Andre Kuehne and Ewald Moser
January Editor’s Picks
Multishot echo-planar MREIT for fast imaging of conductivity, current density, and electric field distributions, by Munish Chauhan, Rohini Vidya Shankar, Neeta Ashok Kumar, Vikram D. Kodibagkar and Rosalind Sadleir
Audioslides
High-resolution in vivo diffusion imaging of the human brain with generalized slice dithered enhanced resolution: Simultaneous multislice (gSlider-SMS), by Kawin Setsompop, Qiuyun Fan, Jason Stockmann, Berkin Bilgic, Susie Huang, Stephen F. Cauley, Aapo Nummenmaa, Fuyixue Wang, Yogesh Rathi, Thomas Witzel and Lawrence L. Wald
Audioslides
New method to characterize and correct with sub-µs precision gradient delays in bipolar multispoke RF pulses, by Vincent Gras, Alexandre Vignaud, Alexis Amadon, Franck Mauconduit, Denis Le Bihan and Nicolas Boulant
December Editor’s Picks
Oxidation of [U-13C]glucose in the human brain at 7T under steady state conditions, by Sergey Cheshkov, Ivan E. Dimitrov, Vikram Jakkamsetti, Levi Good, Dorothy Kelly, Karthik Rajasekaran, Ralph J. DeBerardinis, Juan M. Pascual, A. Dean Sherry and Craig R. Malloy
Audioslides
Simultaneous determination of metabolite concentrations, T1 and T2 relaxation times, by Li An, Shizhe Li and Jun Shen
Audioslides: coming soon!
By Zahra Hosseini & Phillip Ward
Hongjiang WeiRecently, we had the pleasure to sit down and have a chat with Dr. Hongjiang Wei and Dr. Chunlei Liu about their editor-selected manuscript entitled “Investigating Magnetic Susceptibility of Human Knee Joint at 7 Tesla.” The conversation took a technical turn right away, when we asked the authors about their chosen technique, quantitative susceptibility mapping (or QSM). Hongjiang explained that, “quantitative susceptibility mapping is an approach to, as the name implies, extract a map of the underlying tissue susceptibility on a pixel-by-pixel basis. QSM computes the magnetic susceptibility from the phase signal of gradient recalled echoes with the assumption that phase shift is mainly due to susceptibility induced field inhomogeneity.” In simple terms, it is a map that demonstrates how tissues interact with the magnetic field of the MRI scanner.