Master’s project – Application of non-invasive MR imaging of vascular bed and CSF space in the mouse brain

  • Are you interested in starting a master’s project in the fields of neuroscience?

  • Are you interested in learning about what drives the CSF transport in the brain?

  • Are you interested in learning how to perform high-resolution MR imaging?

  • Was your wish to learn advanced data analysis of biomedical data, and derive meaningful conclusions?

  • Your background is biomedical or technical related to biomedical imaging?

You are welcome to join us at the Center for Translational Neuromedicine (CTN) and MRI Core in Panum!

You will have a chance to be part of the research team in CTN, at the University of Copenhagen. CTN is a dynamic world-class status facility with more than 30 neuroscientists and state-of-the-art scientific equipment.

This project will be performed at the preclinical MRI Core Facility (Faculty of Health and Medical Sciences, University of Copenhagen). The Core Facility houses a 9.4T ultra-high field MRI equipment along with a large variety of coils and peripheral devices. By using the most optimal setup for the scheduled experiments, you will have a chance to generate new exciting and valuable data, analyze it, and draw important for neuroscientific community conclusions.

To date, MRI offers the highest spatiotemporal resolution for the whole brain imaging in-vivo. Still, brain vasculature and CSF transport are mainly assessed in MRI using dynamic contrast enhancement (DCE) in anesthetized or awake rodents. Although live monitoring of water molecule kinetics in the animal brain is crucial to understand the CSF dynamics, we have very limited knowledge on this matter due to the lack of objective non-invasive methods for preclinical and clinical in-vivo assessment.

During your project, you will employ fully non-invasive diffusion-weighted imaging (DWI) in combination with fast steady-state methods for CSF space imaging, and Dixon fat/water quantification to provide new qualitative and quantitative assessment of the water molecule behavior in the mouse brain. You will learn how to: calculate and optimize the scanning parameters; visualize and measure desired phenomena; postprocess acquired data. Results of the project are expected to become a part of new MR methods for live imaging of the brain vascular bed and CSF space, and to be compared to previous findings using DCE-MRI.

Would you like to learn more, feel free to contact Ryszard Gomolka, post doc at the Center for Translational Neuromedicine and MRI Core Facility, at ryszard.gomolka@sund.ku.dk.