Applications of MRI in clinical medicine
During the past decades enormous progress was achieved in MRI with exciting new applications in clinical medicine. New MRI techniques using gradient echoes, dynamic contrast enhanced MRI, magnetic resonance angiography, blood bolus tagging, etc. nowadays allow the measurement of important physiological parameters in humans like tissue diffusion, perfusion, or oxygenation with high clinical impact in therapy planning and monitoring. In addition, fast imaging techniques can be used to evaluate hemodynamic parameters (blood flow, acceleration time, pulse wave velocity) in humans. At high field strength of > 3.0 Tesla other nuclei like sodium offer the possibility to image tissue viability non-invasively by measuring the sodium-potassium pump. Especially in radiotherapy treatment planning, MRI can be used to develop methods for an improved fit of the therapeutic dose to the target volume while bypassing normal tissue and neighboring organs at risk because of its high soft tissue contrast. Furthermore, the potential of non-invasive functional MRI of brain stimulation offers the possibility of definition of structures at risk in high dose therapy (e.g. heavy ion therapy). Using the powerful gradient system of modern scanners, a successful transfer of interesting measuring techniques from head to body is the focus of actual clinical developments. Thereby, imaging of the human lung is a very challenging topic of today where hyperpolarized Helium-3 can be used for improvement of lung ventilation measurements. In addition, techniques for non-invasive determination of tissue oxygenation and perfusion (T2*- and T1-techniques) can be adapted for studying the myocardial viability, and are of general interest in oncology of moving organs. The lecture covers a brief introduction in MRI for understanding this new imaging techniques with clinical examples of ongoing human studies and experiments on a modern human 3.0 Tesla MRI scanner
Teaching information on the course can be found on the Website of Prof. Schad