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New ²H Metabolic and ¹H Functional MRI Avenues Opened by Ultrahigh Fields
Webinar Overview
NMR spectroscopy is well known for its ability to resolve chemically distinct sites at ultrahigh fields. NMR relaxation parameters are also known to show distinct field dependencies. Lucio Frydman discusses how these NMR characteristics can open distinctly valuable opportunities in the characterization of health and disease at ultrahigh fields.
He exemplifies two such avenues, explored at 15.2T on mice models. One concerns the characterization of in vivo metabolic processes in cancer, as studied by ²H magnetic resonance spectroscopic imaging (MRSI). Customized spectroscopic imaging methods were developed to maximize the power of this emerging technique, which yielded new information and biological insight difficult or altogether impossible to obtain by other methods.
The other concerns the utilization of functional MRI methods, to detect activation in the olfactory bulb of mice. Such studies were faced with substantial field inhomogeneity problems, which were overcome by spatiotemporally encoded single-shot methods. With these, images collected at a 125 µm in-plane resolution yielded remarkably large and well-defined responses to olfactory cues, of up to 8%. These were unambiguously linked to olfaction via single-nostril experiments, and highlighted specific activation regions when stimulated by aversive or appetitive odors. The prospects of these methods for further biological research, as well as for potential human translation, is briefly discussed.
On Demand Session
Speaker
Prof. Lucio Frydman
Professor at Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot, Israel and Chief Scientist at US National High Magnetic Field Laboratory, Tallahassee, FL, USA
