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Projekt Druckansicht

Mesoskopische Detektion und Verfolgung der Nervenbahnen im menschlichen Gehirn

Fachliche Zuordnung Medizinische Physik, Biomedizinische Technik
Förderung Förderung von 2009 bis 2018
Projektkennung Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Projektnummer 151062073
 
Erstellungsjahr 2019

Zusammenfassung der Projektergebnisse

This project was aimed at finding properties of different cellular species inside the living human brain using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) sensitized to the thermal motion (diffusion) of water molecules. The first goal was to find the long-distance connections inside the brain realized by axons, which are very long processes of neural cells carrying their output signals to other cells. The competition-winning method known as the global fiber tracking (or global tractography) was an extension of previous method to better reflect the realistic biophysical properties of axons. The second part of this project aimed at determination further properties of axons and the embedding tissue beyond their spatial configuration. The research focus was on the volume fractions of cellular compartments and the intensity of water diffusion within them. Such information has been unavailable before due to the spatial resolution of MRI, which is two – three orders of magnitude coarser than the typical cell size. Therefore, the signals from individual compartments are well mixed in the overall MRI signal. Disentangling these contributions became possible within this project due to developed theoretical modeling of the MRI signal formation and advanced information processing. Initially motivated by the need to improve the accuracy of fiber tracking, the developed methods have a high potential for fundamental and clinical research. Accessing parameters of specific cell populations rather that the overall tissue-averaged metrics can provide for more specific and sensitive biomarkers of pathologies serving earlier and more differential diagnostic in medicine. In particular, the preliminary results of this project show a sharper delineation of the infarct core in ischemic stroke and demonstrate a complicated pattern of tissue change in glioma, a common brain tumor type.

Projektbezogene Publikationen (Auswahl)

 
 

Zusatzinformationen

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