Introduction: MRI is an important diagnostic tool providing noninvasive evidence of multiple sclerosis (MS) lesions in the central nervous system. Assessing longitudinal changes in lesion volume load using accepted imaging methods (T2, T2 FLAIR, and T1 weighted imaging after Gd contrast administration) serves as a valuable tool for evaluating treatment effects, monitoring disease progression an...

Quantitative assessment of myelin density in the white matter is an emerging tool for neurodegenerative disease related studies such as multiple sclerosis and Schizophrenia. For the last two decades, T2 relaxometry based on multi-exponential fitting to a single slice multi-echo sequence has been the most common MRI technique for myelin water fraction (MWF) mapping, where the short T2 is associa...

Even though neuroimaging and clinical studies indicate that amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) manifests with distinct clinical phenotypes, no objective test exists to assess upper motor degeneration in ALS. There is great interest in identifying biomarkers of ALS to allow earlier diagnosis and to recognize disease subtypes. Current quantitative neuroimaging techniques such as T2 relaxometry a...

Title of dissertation: TENSOR COMPLETION FOR MULTIDIMENSIONAL INVERSE PROBLEMS WITH APPLICATIONS TO MAGNETIC RESONANCE RELAXOMETRY Ariel Hafftka, Doctor of Philosophy, 2016 Dissertation directed by: Professor Wojciech Czaja Department of Mathematics This thesis deals with tensor completion for the solution of multidimensional inverse problems. We study the problem of reconstructing an approxima...

OBJECTIVE White matter hyperintensities (WMH) observed on neuroimaging of elderly individuals are associated with cognitive decline and disability. However, the pathogenesis of WMH remains poorly understood. We observed that regions of reduced cerebrovascular reactivity (CVR) in the white matter of young individuals correspond to the regions most susceptible to WMH in the elderly. This finding ...

OBJECTIVE Quantitative and semi-quantitative MRI (qMRI) metrics provide complementary specificity and differential sensitivity to pathological brain changes compatible with brain inflammation, degeneration, and repair. Moreover, advanced magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) metrics with overlapping elements amplify the true tissue-related information and limit measurement noise. In this work, we co...

Tumor-associated macrophages (TAM) maintain a chronic inflammation in cancers, which is associated with tumor aggressiveness and poor prognosis. The purpose of this study was to: (1) evaluate the pharmacokinetics and tolerability of the novel ultrasmall superparamagnetic iron oxide nanoparticle (USPIO) compound GEH121333; (2) assess whether GEH121333 can serve as a MR imaging biomarker for TAM;...

We report x-ray diffractometry in a single crystal of 2-t-butyl-4-methylphenol (TMP) and low-frequency solid state nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) proton relaxometry in a polycrystalline sample of TMP. The x-ray data show TMP to have a monoclinic, P2(1)/c, structure with eight molecules per unit cell and two crystallographically inequivalent t-butyl group (C(CH(3))(3)) sites. The proton spin-l...