Events Calendar

High-dimensional Magnetic Resonance Imaging of Microstructure

Speaker: Daeun Kim, Electrical Engineering, University of Southern California

Talk Title: High-dimensional Magnetic Resonance Imaging of Microsctucture

Series: Medical Imaging Seminar Series

Abstract: Microstructure imaging in MRI represents imaging approaches to infer biological tissue properties at the cellular level (i.e., microscopic scale) from a macroscopic imaging voxel. Conventional approaches to microstructure imaging have focused on unmixng sub-voxel compartments that are present within each voxel of MR images acquired with a single MR contrast mechanism such as diffusion or relaxation. However, unambiguously distinguishing between these sub-voxel compartments continues to be challenging with conventional methods due to the ill-posedness of the inverse problem.

This work aims at developing a novel high-dimensional MRI method to provide substantially improved abilities of resolving microstructural compartments. A main idea of the method is to use high-dimensional contrast encoding with multiple MR contrast mechanisms (e.g., both diffusion and relaxation) combined with spatially-constrained reconstruction to improve the ill-posedness. In the context of the high-dimensional MRI method, we present 1) a novel experiment design scheme, 2) estimation and optimization strategies and 3) validation and application.


Biography: Daeun Kim is a PhD candidate in Electrical Engineering at University of Southern California, supervised by Professor Justin Haldar. She received her B.S. and M.S. degrees in Electronic and Electrical Engineering at Ewha Womans University, South Korea. Her research focuses on multidimensional signal processing for microstructure imaging in MRI. Her recent work was recognized as one of the most top ten popular abstract at the International Society for Magnetic Resonance in Medicine (ISMRM) in 2016, and won the 1st Place Award for Best Abstract Presentation at the Quantitative MR Study Group of the ISMRM in 2017. She is also a recipient of the USC Alfred E. Mann Innovation in Engineering Doctoral Fellowship and the USC WiSE Merit Award for Current Doctoral Students in 2017.

Host: Professor Justin Haldar

Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 248

Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

Contact: Talyia White