Tales of Need and Greed: Flying High to the Limits of K-space

Description

Appointed as “Professor of MR Methods for Neuroscience”

Fifty years have passed since the inception of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), and today it is hard to imagine clinical care and many fields of research without it. The huge success of MRI is driven in tandem by research curiosity and commercial players, marked by a fierce chase for evermore signal – the precious currency that buys us imaging speed and resolution. In this pursuit, physicists and engineers tirelessly keep pushing the boundaries of magnetic field strength, scanner hardware, and image reconstruction, and inventing new ways of capturing and extracting information from the MR signal. Especially in the arena of ultra-high field (UHF) MRI, the Netherlands have long held a leading position. In this lecture, I will discuss the significant impact that UHF MRI has had on the neurosciences, and vice versa. With dedicated acquisitions to exploit UHF signal properties, resolution of UHF specific challenges and tailored reconstruction approaches, it opens a plethora of opportunities for probing deeper into the brain’s structural and functional organization, as I will show with examples of our work from Maastricht and elsewhere.

Period	19 Jan 2024
Held at	Maastricht University