Pushing the boundaries for spinal cord imaging in children

小儿神经系统是非常脆弱的一些侮辱，如生长限制，窒息，早产和母体物质依赖，许多导致炎性损伤。虽然在过去几年中已经对儿科大脑进行了广泛研究，但脊髓仍然是用MRI成像和分析的具有挑战性的结构，这主要是由于儿童成像固有的运动和易变性相关伪影以及缺乏考虑儿科人群解剖结构的专用于脊髓MRI数据的图像处理软件。在过去的几年里，我一直在开发脊髓成像和医学图像处理开源软件方面的专业知识。拟议的研究计划的长期目标是建立一个全面的采集和处理框架，允许一个强大的评估小儿脊髓易感性。该研究计划由三个短期目标组成：（O1）开发一种快速可靠的颈脊髓定量磁敏感性成像（QSM）采集方案。(O2)建立一个基于扩散MRI的QSM重建模型，该模型集成了显微结构先验。(O3)在儿科人群中演示开发的采集、重建和处理QSM协议。该研究项目将培养3名博士生、1名硕士生和2名本科生。拟议的研究计划将导致儿科脊髓MRI的重大进展。它有可能在临床上大大降低MRI采集成本，并提供更准确和更强大的定量工具，用于评估生长脊髓的显微结构特征。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.