Medical Physics Seminar - Seminario de Física Médica
Title: PET/MR in neuroscience, challenges, potential, and perspectives.
Author: Christoph Lerche, PhD
Affiliation: Forschungszentrum Jülich. Head of the PET-Physics group at the Institute of Neuroscience and Medicine (INM-4 – Medical Imaging Physics) at the Forschungszentrum Jülich GmbH, Jülich, Germany.
Summary: A combination of PET and MRI techniques enables unique access to both function and structure of the human brain, which will add important information for brain architecture mapping, local metabolic activity, and receptor expression of the healthy or diseased brain. There are many synergies between both modalities. PET is the most sensitive imaging tool for neuroscientific imaging of the human brain and has contributed significantly to the understanding of cerebrovascular diseases, dementia, movement disorders, epilepsy, schizophrenia, addictive disorders, depression, anxiety disorders, brain tumours, and also the healthy brain. MRI is the standard brain imaging technology providing high spatial resolution and excellent soft-tissue contrast and enables the precise access to neuroanatomy, morphometry, volumetry, and a series of functional mappings. Functional MRI allows brain activity to be visualised via measurements of the blood oxygenation level dependent effect and MR spectroscopy is a further, rapidly growing research field and an important MRI technique. The combination of MRI with the metabolic PET and its interpretation is an ongoing topic of pre-clinical and clinical research as it allows to relate structural and functional MRI to local metabolism accessible with MRS and to key neurotransmitter systems accessible with PET. Nevertheless, also ddifferent technical problems have to be overcome for integration of hybrid MR-PET into the scientific imaging workflow. In this presentation, challenges, potential, and perspectives for the application of hybrid PET/MR in neuroscience will be discussed.
Online link: https://conectaha.csic.es/b/fer-gny-a0x-omp. The room access code will be sent per e-mail.
Ana Ros y Fernando Hueso