Guest Seminar: Hans Wehrl, PhD: "PET/MR Imaging in small animals

Monday, July 21, 2014 - 14:00 to 15:00
Seminar room 2204, Bldg. 149, Charlestown Navy Yard

Hans Wehrl, Ph.D. 
University of Tuebingen, Germany
 
Combined PET/MR imaging has become increasingly popular not only in the clinical setting but also in preclinical domain. This talk focuses on the use of PET/MR for rodent research. A brief introduction into the basics of PET/MR and its challenges will be given, followed by example studies. In oncological research, combined PET/MR imaging was used to study the choline metabolism in brain tumors using [11C]choline-PET and MR-spectroscopy. A regional mismatch between both modalities was observed, that was further evaluated using ex vivo methods such as mass spectrometric imaging and histology. In the domain of brain function, PET/MR was applied to study the BOLD effect relative to changes in blood flow, as measured with [15O]H2O and glucose metabolism, assed with [18F]FDG. The FDG-PET measurements revealed a mismatch when compared to BOLD-fMRI in some areas oft the brain, which could indicate that some processes might be too small or on a different time scale to be revealed by BOLD imaging. The combination of PET/MR in neuroscience can also ultimately lead to Cometomics, which combines Connectomics with metabolic information.