Regensburg 2010 – scientific programme

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BP: Fachverband Biologische Physik

BP 16: SYMM: Magnetism and Medicine

BP 16.1: Invited Talk

Wednesday, March 24, 2010, 09:30–10:00, H1

Magnetic resonance imaging: an ongoing success story — •Jens Frahm — Biomedizinische NMR Forschungs GmbH, Am Fassberg 11, 37070 Goettingen, Germany

The fascinating development of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) started more than 35 years ago when Paul Lauterbur published a seminal paper on an imaging method based on nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR). Since then, MRI evolved from a toy for physicists to one of the most important tools in diagnostic imaging, with almost 100 million examinations per year worldwide. In addition, noninvasive MRI studies of experimental animals (e.g., genetically modified mice) play a unique role in translational biomedical research linking advances in molecular biology to studies of human patients. The main driving force behind the large range of diverse MRI methods and applications is the quest for image quality, specificity, and speed. This presentation will illustrate some of these developments by focusing on selected examples. Specific topics include the MRI access to human brain function and the underlying axonal connectivity and fiber architecture. The talk will further address recent progress in real-time MRI yielding movies with up to 40 frames per second. Such techniques exploit non-Cartesian radial encoding schemes and iterative image reconstructions using regularized nonlinear inversion.