Principal Investigators: Richard Edden, PhD, Georg Oeltzschner, PhD
Co-investigators: Peter Barker, Peter van Zijl, Jiadi Xu, Nirbhay Yadav, İpek Özdemir, Helge Zöllner
Measurements of brain biochemistry provide system-specific information of importance in the study of normal and abnormal brain development, diagnosis of neurological and oncological diseases in the brain, and for monitoring the response to treatment. In TRD2, we develop methods to investigate brain chemistry in health and disease, motivated by the needs of our collaborative projects and service partners. We will apply direct detection of protons in metabolites with magnetic resonance spectroscopy (MRS) and spectroscopic imaging (MRSI), and indirect detection of exchangeable protons in metabolites through amplifying saturation transfer (ST) to the bulk water proton signal with ST-MRI. The focus of the work is to develop methods that are robust to subject motion and instrumental instabilities, leveraging the transformative technology of artificial intelligence (AI) to deliver intelligent acquisitions that adapt during the scan to deliver higher data quality and workflow efficiency, by reducing data loss and subject recall. Under Aim 1, we will develop new adaptive MRS acquisitions that apply AI to interrogate each TR and adjust acquisition parameters, as well as down-field MRSI methods that use AI to recognize which transients should be exclude from sparse reconstruction. In Aim 2, we will develop new ST-MRI acquisition methods that leverage improved imaging readouts and adaptive sequences that correct in real-time for B0 and B1 instabilities. In Aim 3, we will develop processing, modeling, and quantification approaches for MRS and ST-MRI, and develop consensus quality control metrics for MRS.
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