After the first meeting this Monday, I met my mentor, Ajay
Gupta, Tuesday afternoon. He is a board-certified radiologist specializing in
neuroradiology. Cooperating with my advisor, Dr. Wang, Ajay shows great
interests in mapping oxygen extraction fraction and metabolic rates in brains
using MRI techniques. After the meeting we attended a tumor board where doctors
were gathered in a conference room to discuss and exchange opinions on
difficult and atypical cases. Despite the difficulties in fully understanding
the discussions, I did realize that MRI is heavily used in the field. More than
50% of the time MR images were showed and used to evaluate patients because of
their non-invasive and yet informative nature. CT and PET are used as well.
However, due to their invasive nature doctors took extra cautions when ordering
CT and PET for their patients.
Then I spent the rest of the week in the CT and MRI reading
room. I participated in image reading with doctors. While MRI technology is
relatively mature, there is certainly room for improvement. For instant, image
resolution could be higher. This is mainly due to the ‘slow’ nature of MRI.
Higher resolution requires much longer scanning time (in the order from 30
minutes to 2 hours), which is impractical. Artifact can also be seemed quite
frequently due to motions.
No comments:
Post a Comment