Seminar: Large‐Scale Clinical MRI & Associated Technological Development

Date/Time: 10th April, 2-3pm
Location: Room M6-502 (Breast Clinic Theatre), 6th floor, Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre
Speaker:  Jacob Levman, PhD

Canada Research Chair in Bioinformatics
Department of Mathematics, Statistics and Computer Science
St. Francis Xavier University
Research Associate
Boston Children’s Hospital
Harvard Medical School

Abstract

Boston Children’s Hospital’s (BCH) commitment to excellence in clinical research is exemplary. In 2007, Boston Children’s Hospital replaced their entire clinical MRI suite with 3 Tesla Siemens systems providing abnormally high quality and consistent imaging in a clinical environment. Recognizing the potential of many MRI pulse sequences that would be relegated to pure research in other centres, BCH’s clinical imaging department elected to include a variety of advanced MRI pulse sequences as part of routine clinical imaging (including high angular resolution diffusion imaging, resting state functional MRI and more). BCH also developed an interface to the hospital’s clinical imaging database that provides access to all hospital affiliated researchers. This approach to clinical imaging research has supported a large‐scale analysis of clinical MRI data focused on healthy brain development (1,069 patients) as well as the world’s largest autism MRI study (2,250 examinations) both of which will be featured in this presentation. Related technologies have also been developed to support ongoing neuroscience research based on the enormous amount of high quality clinical data at BCH. This includes software to provide tractography measurements distributed regionally across a patient’s brain, hemispheric asymmetry analysis, novel machine learning formulations and regional brain maturation assessment on a per subject basis. Future work will continue large‐scale neuroscience analyses of clinical MRI data focused on the many neurodevelopmental disorders imaged with MRI at BCH (multiple sclerosis, cerebral palsy, ADHD, tuberous sclerosis complex, neurofibromatosis, migraine, language disorders and much more).