We have the great pleasure of having Associate Professor Aviv Mezer from the Edmond & Lily Safra Center for Brain Sciences, Jerusalem, as a guest at DRCMR on 15 June 2018. Aviv will give a talk entitled: "How human white-matter studies can be improved beyond diffusion imaging: The quantitative MRI perspective."

"Understanding human brain structure organization in health, disease and development is one of the great challenges for neuroscience. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is the most valuable technique for non-invasive in-vivo imaging of the human brain. However, the use of MRI is currently limited, due to the lack of a theory that links the specific biological structures to the measured signal. In my presentation, I will describe a quantitative- MRI (qMRI) method, using proton density (PD) and T1, which enables measurement of the biophysical properties of human brain tissue, such as the lipid and macromolecular tissue volume and the macromolecular physicochemical environment. I will discuss how such measurements quantities can be used for 1) identifying white-matter pathways, 2) testing hypotheses of the principles underlying lifespan changes in white-matter structure, and 3) measuring white-matter laterality.

Quantitative measurements and models of the living human brain offer a unique opportunity to bridge the gap between cognitive, systems and cellular neuroscience. Such understanding of how different tissue types develop and degenerate could be crucial to the early diagnosis and treatment of developmental and degenerative disorders."

The talk will be held on Friday, 15 June 2018 at 9:00 o'clock in the MR Conference Room.