Title: Neurochemical imaging: basic principles and applications
Speaker: Prof. David M. Niddam
Brain Research Center & Instutute of Brain Science,
National Yang-Ming University
Time: 2014/3/25 Tue 14:00 ~ 16:00
Venue: 1st Conference Room, Auditorium and Activity Center (陽明大學活動中心第一會議室).

Abstract:
Magnetic resonance spectroscopy (MRS) is a unique non-invasive imaging technique that provides complementary biochemical information about a wide range of brain functions. For a given region, it is possible to simultaneously quantify several metabolites in the proton spectrum, including the neurotransmitters glutamate and GABA. Most proton MRS studies have employed single voxels to study a priori defined regions. However, with single voxels it is not possible to obtain information about metabolite distributions or to perform an anatomically unconstrained explorative analysis. With the development of magnetic resonance spectroscopic imaging (MRSI) these types of analyses become feasible. With MRSI, multivoxel data is acquired in 2D slices or in 3D volumes and metabolite distributions can be mapped and related directly to the brain anatomy. Although other functional imaging modalities have taken advantage of population based inferences using spatially extended statistics this approach remains little utilized for MRSI. In this talk, MRSI applied to the medial wall of the human brain is introduced. The reproducibility of the method and implementation of statistical nonparametric mapping (SnPM) is presented together with the possibilities of combining MRSI with resting-state fMRI data. Examples of the application of these methods in chronic pain patients will also be presented.