| Description |
The PERFORM Centre is developing in vivo magnetic resonance spectroscopy (MRS) and imaging for translational applications, including identification of imaging biomarkers for Alzheimer’s Disease. MRS allows in situ metabolic analysis and enables characterization of different metabolites in the brain, including N-Acetylaspartate (NAA), glutamate (Glu), glutamine (Gln), choline-containing compounds (Cho), creatine compounds (Cr) and myo-inositol (mI) have a typical concentration between 1 and 10 mM, and reduced NAA or NAA/Cr levels have been found in diseases such Alzheimer’s Disease. The proposed multidisciplinary project aims to set up and conduct advanced MRS neuroimaging studies in clinical and healthy patients. The students will have the opportunity to develop and evaluate MRS data analysis approaches. The developments include quantitative signal processing techniques and software design for MRS analysis.
The project will be supervised by Dr. Habib Benali, and the students will work in a highly multidisciplinary environment (engineering, physics, psychology, neurosciences) in collaboration with academic and hospital institutions in Montreal (PERFORM Centre, Centre de Recherche de l’Institut Universitaire de Gériatrie de Montréal).
The research themes that will be addressed by the capstone project will include:
• design and MRS data collection;
• developing and evaluating methods dedicated to the analysis of MRS data;
• software design for MRS analysis;
• application (quantification of biomarkers for Alzheimer’s Disease).
The PERFORM Centre is a 8,000 m2 research facility with eight inter-related research platforms including a fully equipped imaging suite (3T MRI, high-density EEG, NIRS, TMS, SPECT-CT, PET-CT, Ultrasound and Dexa) entirely dedicated to research (http://www.concordia.ca/research/perform.html).
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