Another sunny day in Vienna, but I was actually really grateful to be inside all day, after my little taste of Vienna’s nightlife last night.. didn’t quite make the early morning teaching session on diffusion and perfusion MR imaging of the brain, I’m afraid.

Fortunately, this is the country of extremely good coffee, even allowed to be taken into the lecture rooms, otherwise I would have missed GJ Kasprian’s (Vienna, AT) results from in vivo DTI and fibre tracking of the human fetus, as early as at 25 weeks’ gestation. Very impressive.

My big highlight of the day was going to be prof. Glazer’s (Stanford, US) lecture on new horizons in MR imaging, but unfortunately he couldn’t make it and had sent one of his disciples instead . Still, I’d never heard of Na-imaging of the brain in stroke: not something for the near future I think, since 3T’s really the minimum apparently, and even their 7T images still looked very noisy. Very impressive DTI images as well, showing the small connecting fibres between the internal and external capsule, but without any information on the actual acquisition, I suspect this is not an easy one to reproduce.. Ultra-short TE sequences (in the range of 0.08 ms) are going to be the way to go for solid tissues, such as cartilage, white matter and even bone.. let’s see what the future brings!

The European Congress of Radiology in Vienna kicked off today, and I started my day with presenting our combined fMRI/DTI study of the arcuate fasciculus. Very happy to say that this paper has just become available online.

There was an interesting talk by Lutz et al. who studied fibromyalgia patients’ brains with DTI, and found a significant increase of FA values in these patients’ amygdala, hippocampus and cingulate gyrus compared with healthy controls. Will we find a “somatic” cause for this syndrome after all?

Flatz et al. compared DTI at 1.5T with 3.0T, and (fortunately - no need to correct my talk for tomorrow!) confirmed that SNR doubles at 3.0T compared to 1.5T; The same SNR of an 8 averages non-isotropic voxel scan (12 mm³) at 1.5T will be achieved with an isotropic scan (8 mm³) of 4 averages at 3.0T: better resolution and a bit faster.

Slightly reassuring was a talk by Kutschbach et al. saying that caffeine was not physically addictive (although withdrawal symptoms do occur!), and therefore not considered a drug legally. Less reassuring was their finding that a dose of 100mg of caffeine was enough to induce T2* changes measurable with SWI.. and to a much lesser extent in the “regular users” than in “non-users”. Should I reduce my coffee consumption (and go into withdrawal)? Now, with still 3 talks to prepare and deliver, it just doesn’t seem the right time..

The talk by Bohner et al. - presenting results on brain activation related to pictures of high-calory food in obese people - just left me wondering… how did they get these BMI>35+ volunteers to fit inside the scanner?

Finally, according to dr. Salomonowitz, we lose up to 10% of our brain fibres per decade as we age.. based on the absolute numbers of fibres that are all beautifully automatically created in DTIstudio.. oh dear. Don’t think I’ll need to start worrying about my brain fibres just yet.

Aad treating us to lunch because our paper “Fiber density asymmetry of the Arcuate Fasciculus in relation to functional hemispheric language lateralization in both right and left-handed healthy subjects: a combined fMRI and DTI study” got accepted for publication in NeuroImage.

dtV II.SR is one of the most commonly used fibre tracking tools for deterministic tractography, developed by Yoshitaka Masutani and implemented in Volume-One. It lets you import your DTI data in DICOM format, but you may encounter problems importing if:

1. your DICOM files are in a folder that is not at the root level.
2. dTV fails to create a temp folder. You can solve this by creating this folder (c:\\temp) yourself.
3. you are not using Windows XP. You will need to install Install .NET Framework ver 1.1 (available from Microsoft).

See also the dTV trouble shooting page.

Monique Bernsen, myself and Aad van der Lugt at ESMRMB 2006, where I presented “Fusion of fMRI and Diffusion Tensor: practical applications” during the lunch symposium organised by GE Healthcare.

Due to very, very poor time management, I spent all my time in Warsaw preparing my presentation - in my hotel room - and missed the opportunity of visiting the city . The excellent coffee bar that I had breakfast at, however, seems plenty of reason to visit Warsaw again - properly.