Tuesday, May 7, 2024
5/7/2024
PROJECT SUMMARY Brain microstructure imaging is an exponentially growing area of quantitative MRI. It offers the unique ability of noninvasively probing vital cellular-level tissue properties that provide key information on human development, aging and neurological disorders. While no scanner can resolve micrometer-level properties directly, they can be probed from millimeter resolution MRI by employing biophysical modeling of MRI signals of diffusion and other microstructural contrast. The MRI Biophysics group (Drs. Fieremans and Novikov) at the Department of Radiology at the NYU Grossman School of Medicine has been at the forefront of this research area, working on modeling, validation and clinical translation of microstructure MRI. However, to optimally serve the large user group of brain researchers, future progress now requires an adequate investment in cutting-edge MRI hardware. Indeed, accurate quantification of microstructural features, such as axon diameters, myelin thickness, cell density and permeability, can only be achieved on MRI systems with magnetic field gradients much stronger than those on the human MR systems currently available at NYU and nearby institutions in New York City. This S10 application requests funding to obtain a unique Human Connectome 2.0 scanner (C2.0), a 3T head- only scanner. Its performance will be extraordinary: 500mT/m gradients and 600 T/m/s slew rate. In comparison, the current best commercial clinical 3T systems offer 80 mT/m gradients at 200 T/m/s slew rate. The world’s first C2.0 system, under development at the moment, is to be delivered to Harvard/MGH site at the end of 2023, and ours will be the second one delivered soon after should the S10 grant be funded. This Siemens scanner will be equipped by the same software as all our other Siemens MR scanners, which will be instrumental for enabling transfer of existing research studies. In addition, the order-of-magnitude boost of the diffusion weightings will enable advanced microstructural mapping of brain gray and white matter in a wide range of neurological disorders. The unprecedented switching speed (slew rate) will push the envelope in diffusion encoding, as well as enable echo-planar images with minimal distortions and joint random matrix theory-based noise reduction. The acquisition of C2.0 aligns with the mission of the Department of Radiology and of the NIH-funded Center for Advanced Imaging Innovation and Research, to translate novel and highly impactful imaging technology rapidly and effectively into clinical practice. A host of collaborative projects with a diverse focal area stands to benefit dramatically from the non-invasive microstructural information which may be gleaned from the C2.0 system. The addition of the C2.0 will provide much needed scan time for a large group of brain researchers and enable transforming the field of microstructure imaging, benefiting basic researchers, patients and physicians who care for them, as well as other academic medical centers within the greater New York City area.
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