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Daniel Gallichan

Frederik Barkhof

Spinal cord MRI is important for the diagnosis and understanding disease mechanisms in multiple sclerosis (MS). Multiple short-segment non-enhancing lesions are pathognomonic for MS and longitudinally extensive transverse myelitis typical of NMOSD. The recommended clinical protocol must include at least 2 of the following 4 sagittal sequences: (i) T2w SE with moderately long TE; (ii) proton-density (turbo/fast) SE; (iii) STIR; iv) PSIR. The single acquisition of a T2w sequence is not sufficient, due to its limited sensitivity in depicting signal abnormalities and a second sequence (PD, STIR, PSIR) is required to confirm the presence of lesions and exclude artefacts

Virginie Callot

This presentation is intended to give a general overview of the most popular quantitative MR techniques used in the cord. Following a brief overview of the challenges encountered as compared to the brain, « classical » sequences such as DTI, MT and T1 relaxometry will be presented, followed by a few words about functional, metabolic and vascular techniques. Strengths, weakness, and opportunities, such as brought by ultra-high field, will be discussed as well.

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Cardiovascular magnetic resonance (CMR) is playing an increasingly important role in clinical care and extremely promising techniques are being developed in the research community. However, a large gap in quality remains between scans obtained in controlled research settings and the routine imaging of patients with cardiac disease. New hardware, and acquisition and reconstruction techniques will need to be developed to narrow this gap. 

Jürgen Schneider

Cardiovascular Magnetic Resonance (CMR) is a clinically well-established medical imaging modality that can provide a comprehensive, multi-parametric assessment of the heart in patients. CMR, albeit technically challenging, can yield insights at different scales ranging from the whole heart down to cellular and molecular level in the heart muscle, thereby spanning several orders of magnitude in resolution. This presentation primarily focuses on strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities of CMR. Strengths and weaknesses will be discussed in technical considerations and routine applications, while opportunities will be exemplified in emerging CMR techniques.

Clare Tempany-Afdhal

This session will combine the expertise of a clinician and MR physicist using a SWOT approach to the challenges of MR imaging of Prostate cancer.  Prostate MRI can avoid unnecessary biopsy using the PI-RADS assessment scores (all qualitative) suspicious lesions can be identified, scored, and targeted during biopsy. Current challenges include  reliable quantitative metrics of cancer, uniformly high-quality exams. There are multiple new MR pulses sequences under investigation to enrich our current protocols. Several of these will lead to quantifiable metrics which can add further validation of mpMRI for detection, characterization and monitoring of men with suspected prostate cancer.

Eleftheria Panagiotaki

This part of the course will cover different quantitative MRI methods for prostate cancer characterisation. We will mainly focus on Diffusion-weighted MRI and T2-weighted MR methods.