1H MRS in vivo Measurements in Brain: Will it ever be a standard clinical tool?

Our third lecture of the 2024 season will be an alternative take by a renowned expert on prospects for neurologic and psychiatric applications of magnetic resonance spectroscopy (MRS). While MRS is used routinely in a few areas, such as management of brain tumors, practical applications are still being sought for a much wider range of brain disorders in neurology and psychiatry for which it is a prominent research tool. What disease-relevant information is buried within the brain MRS signal? What interfering factors (multiple overlapping metabolite peaks, variable baselines, noise, tissue and subject heterogeneity,…) must be disentangled to extract that information? What further practical and logistical challenges are there to expanding reliable clinical uses of MRS? This lecture concerns all this and beyond.

Our speaker, Dr. Charles Gasparovic, is one of the great creative spirits of MRS technology. For decades he has contributed solutions on topics such as brain tissue segmentation, tissue-specific metabolite relaxation and water content, spectral modelling, MRS quantitation including the water reference, and more. He is the senior author of the MRS expert consensus guidelines. He draws upon extensive experience in MRS of schizophrenia; traumatic brain injury; alcohol use disorder; IQ, creativity and personality research; MRS of premature infants; and more. Chuck has also hinted he may seize this opportunity to give us his definitive take on MRS as he looks back on a long and storied clinical research career!