While several pathologies can affect the brain over the lifespan, all involving different kind of microstructural changes affecting specific tissue compartments like myelin, axons, glia cells or neurons, our ability to diagnose and monitor disease progression, as well as evaluate the efficacy of new therapies, is limited by the lack of specificity of current non-invasive imaging techniques. In other words, current diagnostic tools for looking at brain structure and function can tell us that there is a damage, but often they are not capable of telling us exactly which compartment is damaged. An instrument capable of increasing the specificity of our analysis when looking into the brain is expected to have a tremendous impact on how brain diseases are diagnosed and treated, with a huge benefit for our society. As a matter of fact, the proportion of the global burden of disease that is attributable to neurological, mental health, developmental and substance-use disorders, which is already really high, is expected to rise further in the near future due to the increase in life expectation.
The project MRI-STRUCTURE (Magnetic Resonance Imaging Signal To Recover Unique Cerebral TissUe Response to changEs) aims at developing an innovative imaging technique, based on magnetic resonance, to look at different cell compartments in the brain, in vivo and non-invasively. To develop this framework, I took advantage of the possibility of decomposing the magnetic resonance signal measured in the brain into the contributions of the different cellular compartments. To validate it, I have used the rodent brain to induce a controlled tissue response similar to the reaction observed in different brain pathologies (inflammation, myelin and axonal damage). I then measured the change in the MRI images and compared it with post-mortem histological results, demonstrating that the MRI signal contains the fingerprints of specific cellular compartments, and that these contributions can be teased apart. As a proof of concept of the utility of MRI-STRUCTURE in clinics, I have adapted the imaging protocol to a human scanner to demonstrate the feasibility of the approach. To facilitate even further the adoption of advanced magnetic resonance imaging techniques in hospitals, I have worked with the startup QMENTA to make the analysis platform available in the cloud in a streamlined and easily accessible fashion. All in all, this innovative brain imaging approach is expected to impact on our ability to fight neurodegenerative and inflammatory diseases, by achieving early diagnosis, personalized monitoring of the disease progression and of the efficacy of new therapies.
