Fecha y hora: 27.03.2019, a las 12.00
Lugar: Salón de actos del Cubo Rojo
FERNANDO GALVE
HARD TISSUE MRI
Traditional approaches to MRI of hard tissues, such as bone and teeth, have targeted the spin in the nucleus of hydrogen, very scarce in those materials. Additionally, they suffer from fast decay (short T2) of the received signal, and thus are hard to image. Recently, several techniques with ultrafast pulse sequences have been designed to tackle this problem. They have been successful for bones but failed for the hardest tissues in the body, enamel and dentin, which are central for the health condition of teeth and have the shortest T2. We are working to address phosphorus, much more abundant, as a novel target for MRI giving complementary information for diagnosis. The solid part of hard tissues in the body is made by partially crystalized hydroxylapatite, which has many more phosphorus atoms than hydrogen, and is thus a natural candidate for medical diagnosis. Also, since current ultrafast pulse sequences are in the limit of their capabilities, we will use dynamical decoupling techniques to enhance T2 in hard tissue. These techniques were developed in the field of solid state nuclear magnetic resonance, but have been very seldom put to use for biomedical purposes.
We expect that the combination of dynamical decoupling techniques with phosphorus imaging will make hard tissue MRI possible at the same level of precision and availability currently attained for soft tissues.
