DRCMR Senior Researcher Henrik Lundell has in collaboration with Chloé Najac, Itamar Ronen and their colleagues at the Leiden University Medical Center, The Netherlands, presented a new method for investigating neuronal and glial cell structure in vivo in the human brain. This work unleashes the power of human ultra high field 7T MRI scanners.

The method, double diffusion encoded spectroscopy (DDES), measures the microscopic intracellular mobility of not only water but also metabolites that are specific to certain cell types. These unique data reveal distinct differences between glial and neuronal morphologies in gray and white matter of the healthy human brain.

This new method will have potential to independently resolve neurodegenerative and neuroinflammatory pathologies in diseases like multiple sclerosis.

The work is part of the ERC-funded C-MORPH project and was recently published in Neuroimage:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1053811921002585?via%3Dihub

This project was supported by the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No 804746).