The MRI Resource for Physiologic, Metabolic and Anatomic Biomarkers is an interdepartmental and interdisciplinary consortium combining facilities and expertise of the F.M. Kirby Research Center at Kennedy Krieger Institute, the Department of Radiology at Johns Hopkins University (JHU) School of Medicine, the Center for Imaging Science at the JHU Whiting School of Engineering, and the Department of Biostatistics at the JHU Bloomberg School of Public Health.

Our overall goal is to develop novel noninvasive MRI candidate biomarkers that can be used for:
(i) personalized assessment of patients for diagnosis, prognosis, and treatment monitoring;
(ii) monitoring of the development of new medical technologies and drugs, i.e. for better guiding of clinical trials.

The significance of our proposed developments lies in providing the fundamental design and initial testing (i.e. not clinical trials itself) of new MRI candidate biomarkers with the potential to provide surrogate quantitative imaging endpoints that are as close as possible to clinical endpoints. As such, this Resource focuses on designing, calibrating and standardizing new magnetic resonance (MR) technologies to provide reliable measures across sessions, scanners, and raters. This technology will then be disseminated for larger scale patient studies to allow clinical validation.