This week in our spring term P123 “What Physicists Do” course, our speaker will be Armando Manduca (Professor of Biomedical Engineering and Radiology, Mayo Clinic). Armando will be in Olin 141 on Friday during 6a, talking about “Magnetic Resonance Imaging and Applications”. We’ll have cookies after his talk. See a full listing of speakers and topics on the bulletin board outside Trenne’s office.
MRI exams are an integral part of modern medicine and can provide detailed anatomical and functional images of the human body non-invasively. MRI can also depict or measure an amazingly wide variety of other phenomena: neural activity in the brain, water diffusivity, local microstructural properties, details of blood flow within a vessel or aneurysm, and metabolite concentrations in vivo. How does MRI work? We’ll discuss the basic physical principles involved in MRI, survey a wide variety of applications (and how they work) and then talk in depth about MRI elastography: the imaging of acoustic wave propagation through tissues or other materials, leading to images depicting the “elasticity” of objects. This can be thought of as quantitative, non-invasive touching or poking of structures inside the body, with significant clinical implications.