Feb 27
10:10 a.m.
Whitaker Hall, Room 218
Audrey Fan, PhD, an instructor in the Department of Radiology at Stanford University, will present.
Abstract: Our brain depends on continuous blood flow to deliver the oxygen and
nutrients it needs to function. Disruption to this oxygen supply, as in
cerebrovascular diseases, has devastating consequences, most strikingly in
acute stroke. Noninvasive imaging of brain blood flow and metabolism is
technically challenging, but would provide critical information to diagnose
and select therapies for patients.
My mission is to engineer new imaging
biomarkers of brain physiology to address
this need. In this talk, I describe development
of a novel magnetic resonance imaging (MRI)
technique to quantify oxygenation in cerebral
blood vessels. I also validated MRI methods
to measure cerebral blood flow against the
reference standard by positron emission
tomography (PET), using state-of-the-art
simultaneous PET/MRI hardware. I performed
these studies in challenging cerebrovascular
patient cases, including Moyamoya disease,
and used imaging to inform our basic
understanding of disease pathophysiology.
In the long term, the imaging tools I develop will establish a vascular
“fingerprint” that succinctly captures the metabolic health of an individual,
and alerts us to a broad set of neurological diseases in its earliest stages.
