Pursuing Ultrahigh Magnetic Fields for Sensitivity and Contrast in Brain Imaging
Webinar Overview
Bridging and spanning the multiple spatial scales of organization is an essential, but a daunting task necessary for understanding brain function and ultimately dysfunction. Transformative changes have occurred in the last two decades in our ability towards achieving this task due to a push to exploit unique advantages available at ultrahigh magnetic fields despite the major challenges of imaging at the correspondingly high RF frequencies, and a plethora of novel imaging acquisition techniques that increase spatiotemporal sampling.
Latest in this progress is the effort to push the available magnetic field to 10.5 Tesla for human imaging and ~16 Tesla for animal models, potentially combining the MR measurements with non-MR modalities in case of animal model experiments. Kamil Ugurbil summarizes the state of these recent developments.
On Demand Session
Speaker
Prof. Kamil Ugurbil
McKnight Presidential Endowed Chair Professor and Founding Director Center for Magnetic Resonance Research (CMRR), University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN, USA
Kamil Ugurbil currently holds the McKnight Presidential Endowed Chair Professorship and is the founding Director of the Center for Magnetic Resonance Research (CMRR) at the University of Minnesota. After completing his B.A. and Ph.D. degrees in physics, and chemical physics, respectively, at Columbia University, New York, N.Y., Prof. Ugurbil joined AT&T Bell Laboratories in 1977, and subsequently returned to Columbia as a faculty member in 1979. He was recruited to the University of Minnesota in 1982 where his research in magnetic resonance led to the evolution of his laboratory into an interdepartmental and interdisciplinary research center, the CMRR. His primary research focus has been the development and application of MR methods and instrumentation towards obtaining high resolution and high accuracy functional and anatomical information in the human brain in particular and development of ultrahigh magnetic fields for human imaging in general. This body of work has culminated in pioneering accomplishments, such as the co-introduction of fMRI, the introduction and development of ultrahigh magnetic fields (defined as ≥7 Tesla), functional mapping of columnar and layer specific functional responses in the human brain, and highly accelerated functional brain imaging. He was one of the two PI’s of the Human Connectome Project and one of the fourteen members of the first BRAIN Initiative working group. He was recognized by several awards and honors including membership in the US National Academy of Medicine, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, ISMRM Gold Medal, Richard R. Ernst Gold Medal, ISMAR Prize, Koç Award, the IEEE Medal for Innovations in Healthcare Technology, and two honorary doctors.