When
Monday, October 21, 2024 - 12:00 p.m.
Elizabeth Hutchinson
Assistant Professor
Department of Biomedical Engineering
University of Arizona
"Measuring Microstructure and Slow Flow in the Brain with Diffusion MRI"
Keating 103 | Zoom link, Password: BearDown
Hosts: Alex McGhee and Swarna Ganesh
(Instructor permission required for enrolled students to attend via Zoom)
Persons with a disability may request a reasonable accommodation by contacting the Disability Resource Center at 621-3268 (V/TTY).
Abstract: The MRI signal can be sensitized to the motion of water over a broad range of fluid dynamics using different pulse sequence paradigms and signal reconstruction frameworks. These techniques have evolved over many years to map parameters of brain physiology and structure from blood flow to edema to white matter connections among others. In this talk, I will highlight two advanced diffusion MRI frameworks that promise to provide new metrics of brain health and disease. First, the double diffusion MRI acquisition will be discussed in the context of a novel framework – diffusion tensor subspace imaging (DiTSI) – that our lab has applied to post-mortem human brain tissue with and without Alzheimer’s disease pathology. We have visualized specific fiber pathways and microstructural tissue environments that are typically challenging or impossible for conventional diffusion MRI to discern. Second, the in vivo detection of slow cerebrospinal fluid movement will be examined in the context of the recently described glymphatic system, which is implicated in brain waste removal. I will present our past work in phantom studies and recent work to map different fluid dynamics regimes in the rat cortex. Taken together, these studies demonstrate the versatility and promise of new implementations of the diffusion MRI paradigm for the benefit of brain imaging.
Bio: Dr. Elizabeth Hutchinson is an assistant professor in the department of Biomedical Engineering at the University of Arizona and leads the multi-scale brain imaging lab, which uses pre-clinical imaging – especially diffusion MRI – to better understand brain disorders and develop translationally relevant imaging markers. Dr. Hutchinson has an educational background in physics and neuroscience and her research interests include neuroimaging and pre-clinical models of brain disorders. She has contributed primarily in the areas of diffusion MRI methods and traumatic brain injury (TBI) models and in her work has identified several novel markers of brain pathology that follow brain trauma. She is also interested in the study of epilepsy and Alzheimer’s disease using advanced imaging tools. The main research approaches she uses are radiologic-pathologic correspondence and in-vivo validation studies to associate imaging markers with their biological underpinnings, the development of processing and analysis tools for multi-brain studies, the identification of imaging markers in human-similar models of injury and fixed specimen studies to establish the translational relevance of novel imaging markers. Her current research activities continue to explore and apply advanced neuroimaging approaches through the use of translationally relevant models and pre-clinical neuroimaging across a range of spatial scales and modalities.
Website: msbil.arizona.edu