Challenges & Successes in Imaging the Developing Brain
Member-Initiated Symposium

ORGANIZERS: Franklyn Howe, Petra Huppi, Duan Xu

Monday, 18 June 2018

Session Number: MIS-02

Overview
This Symposium was proposed by the Pediatric MR study group.

Whilst MRI has often been most successful in its applications to brain pathology and physiology, there are some major challenges in its application to babies and children during development. This symposium will take you through the application of MRI from pre-term babies to childhood, showing its synergy with other techniques such as EEG, the use of advanced MR techniques such as DTI and resting state BOLD, to the challenges of integrating the data through the application of machine learning. The development and evaluation of quantitative MRI biomarkers is particularly challenging during development and the best approaches to this will be discussed as well as examples where clinical practice is being changed. Overall, there will be an emphasis on the interplay of technical and novel solutions to important biomedical problems.

Target Audience
Clinicians and researchers who are interested and engaged in imaging research of children

Educational Objectives
As a result of attending this course, participants should be able to:
- Recognize the pediatric specific challenges of MRI and the techniques developed to overcome them;
- Define the role of MRI and multi-modal techniques in probing the anatomic and functional changes as the brain matures from birth to adulthood;
- Identify approaches and advances in quantitative evaluation of the brain and how this is reshaping clinical diagnoses; and
- Describe how computer aided analytic tools can aid the analysis of the diverse MRI and related data acquired in children.