Georg Oeltzschner
Johns Hopkins University, MD·Biomedical Engineering
A brain scan can show more than anatomy. Proton magnetic resonance spectroscopy (1H-MRS), a technique run on MRI scanners, can measure the levels of more than 20 chemicals in the living human brain without surgery.
- Fields
Biomedical Engineering
Neuroscience
Mathematics & Statistics
- Topics
magnetic resonance spectroscopy
proton MRS
brain metabolites
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Apr 2028
What they work on
- Develop a multiverse analysis framework that fits brain 1H-MRS data with many candidate models, including those in existing MRS software, and quantifies how much metabolite estimates vary across them.
- Build model selection tools that use statistical information criteria to identify which spectral models best suit a given 1H-MRS dataset, improving the accuracy and precision of metabolite measurement.
- Combine these strategies with Markov Chain Monte Carlo sampling to estimate model parameter distributions, offering uncertainty estimates that avoid weaknesses of the standard Cramer-Rao Lower Bounds.
- Show that the new methods improve non-invasive measurement of 2-hydroxyglutarate, a tumor metabolite in IDH-mutated low-grade glioma, and release the code through the open-source Osprey software.
More about the research
These chemicals include markers of healthy neurons, neurotransmitters, antioxidants and tumor markers. That makes the method promising for diagnosing disease and checking whether treatments work. One problem holds it back. The measured signal must be fitted with a mathematical model to estimate each chemical's level, and different models often give different answers. Current methods do not report this uncertainty, and there is no way to decide which model is best.
Why it matters
More consistent and accurate MRS measurements could help bring brain chemistry measurement into clinical research, diagnosis and treatment monitoring. Better non-invasive detection of 2-hydroxyglutarate could help clinicians track patients with IDH-mutated low-grade glioma, and the free Osprey software would give MRS researchers practical tools to report measurement uncertainty.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Malgorzata Marjanska
University of Minnesota, MN·Biomedical Engineering
Develop image-guided automatic 3D placement of the MRS measurement voxel in brain tumors, integrate it with a clinical MRI system, and evaluate its accuracy.
Do Young Eun
North Carolina State University, NC·Computer Science
Design self-repellent random walks, multiple interacting walkers that avoid their collective history, with adaptive repellency across space and time to maximize sampling efficiency, and prove theoretical performance guarantees.
Alexandra Konings
Stanford University, CA·Earth & Environmental Science·Early-career
Use the CARDAMOM data assimilation framework, which combines a simple ecosystem model, satellite data and Markov Chain Monte Carlo sampling, to map optimal plant and ecosystem parameters for each pixel across the globe.
The school
Johns Hopkins University: 100 labs on PI Pages, $4.1B a year on research, 622 research doctorates a year.
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