Pushing the boundaries for spinal cord imaging in children

儿科神经系统极易受到一些侮辱，如生长受限、窒息、早产和母体物质依赖，其中许多会导致炎症性损伤。尽管儿科大脑在过去几年中得到了广泛的研究，但脊髓仍然是一个具有挑战性的结构，用MRI进行成像和分析仍然是一个具有挑战性的结构，主要是因为儿童成像固有的运动和敏感性相关伪影，以及缺乏专门用于脊髓MRI数据的图像处理软件，该软件考虑了儿科人群的解剖结构。在过去的几年里，我一直在脊髓成像和医学图像处理开源软件的开发方面积累了很强的专业知识。拟议的研究计划的长期目标是建立一个全面的获取和处理框架，允许对儿童脊髓敏感性进行强有力的评估。这项研究计划由三个短期目标组成：(1)开发一种快速而稳健的颈髓定量易感地形图(QSM)采集方案。(2)建立基于弥散磁共振成像的QSM重建模型，该模型融合了显微结构先验信息。(O3)在儿科人群中演示所开发的获取、重建和处理QSM协议。拟议的研究计划将培养3名博士、1名硕士和2名本科生。拟议的研究计划将导致儿童脊髓磁共振成像的重大进展。它有可能在临床上极大地降低MRI的获取成本，并为评估生长中的脊髓的微结构特征提供更准确和更强大的量化工具。它将为神经放射学家和研究人员提供新的工具，以研究影响儿童脊髓的神经退行性疾病和创伤性损伤的潜在机制。

The pediatric neuronal system is exquisitely vulnerable to a number of insults such as growth restriction, asphyxia, prematurity and maternal substance dependence, many leading to inflammatory injury. While the pediatric brain has been extensively studied over the last years, the spinal cord still remains a challenging structure to image and analyze with MRI, mainly due to the motion- and susceptibility-related artifacts inherent to children imaging and to lack of image processing software dedicated to spinal cord MRI data that takes into account the anatomy of pediatric populations. During the last few years, I have been developing a strong expertise in spinal cord imaging and in the development of open-source software for medical image processing. The long-term objective of the proposed research program is to establish a comprehensive acquisition and processing framework that allows a robust assessment of the pediatric spinal cord susceptibility. The research program is composed of three short-term objectives: (O1) to develop a fast and robust acquisition protocol for cervical spinal cord quantitative susceptibility mapping (QSM). (O2) to develop a reconstruction model for QSM that integrates microstructural priors based on diffusion MRI. (O3) to demonstrate the developed acquisition, reconstruction and processing QSM protocol on a pediatric population. The proposed research program will train 3 PhD, 1 master and 2 undergraduate students. The proposed research program will lead to major advances in pediatric MRI of the spinal cord. It has the potential to greatly reduce MRI acquisition costs in a clinical context as well as provide more accurate and more robust quantitative tools for assessing the microstructural features of the growing spinal cord. It will provide new tools to neuroradiologists and researchers to investigate the underlying mechanisms of neurodegenerative diseases and traumatic injuries affecting the spinal cord in children.