12 Mar 2007

Another sunny day in Vienna, but I was actually really grateful to be inside all day, after my little taste of Vienna’s nightlife last night.. didn’t quite make the early morning teaching session on diffusion and perfusion MR imaging of the brain, I’m afraid.

aria

Fortunately, this is the country of extremely good coffee, even allowed to be taken into the lecture rooms, otherwise I would have missed GJ Kasprian’s (Vienna, AT) results from in vivo DTI and fibre tracking of the human fetus, as early as at 25 weeks’ gestation. Very impressive.

church

My big highlight of the day was going to be prof. Glazer’s (Stanford, US) lecture on new horizons in MR imaging, but unfortunately he couldn’t make it and had sent one of his disciples instead :-(. Still, I’d never heard of Na-imaging of the brain in stroke: not something for the near future I think, since 3T’s really the minimum apparently, and even their 7T images still looked very noisy. Very impressive DTI images as well, showing the small connecting fibres between the internal and external capsule, but without any information on the actual acquisition, I suspect this is not an easy one to reproduce.. Ultra-short TE sequences (in the range of 0.08 ms) are going to be the way to go for solid tissues, such as cartilage, white matter and even bone.. let’s see what the future brings!