Malgorzata Marjanska
University of Minnesota, MN·Biomedical Engineering
Magnetic resonance spectroscopy (MRS) uses an MRI scanner to measure chemicals in the body instead of taking pictures of anatomy. In the brain, it can reveal the metabolic fingerprint of a tumor, or how fast the brain uses fuel, without a biopsy or radiation.
- Fields
Biomedical Engineering
Biophysics
Medicine & Clinical Research
- Topics
magnetic resonance spectroscopy
MR spectroscopic imaging
brain tumors
- Grants
- 3 known grants, through Aug 2027
What they work on
- 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.
- Automate advanced single-voxel MRS acquisition and build a real-time quantification tool that converts spectra into clinically interpretable metabolite results, released as open-source software.
- Test the automated MRS pipeline in a prospective in vivo study, with brain cancer clinicians acting as beta-testers.
- Characterize magnetic field inhomogeneity and scanner instability at 10.5 tesla using MR-compatible sensors, then develop dynamic proton single-voxel spectroscopy and whole-brain spectroscopic imaging.
- Test whether deuterium-labeled glucose and dynamic 2H-to-1H exchange MRS at 10.5 T and 7 T can measure metabolite levels and metabolic rates in the human brain, compared with deuterium metabolic imaging.
More about the research
Two barriers stand in the way. Good measurements currently require expert operators, and existing methods can measure chemical levels but rarely the speed of metabolic reactions. The projects here address both: automating MRS for brain cancer, and building a new method to measure metabolic rates in the human brain.
Why it matters
Automated MRS could let hospitals and clinical trials without spectroscopy experts measure brain tumor chemistry reliably. This may help clinicians classify tumors and judge whether treatment is working, without a biopsy. Measuring metabolic rates noninvasively in the human brain could also give researchers a new tool for studying cancer, dementia and psychiatric disorders, all of which involve changes in metabolism.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Georg Oeltzschner
Johns Hopkins University, MD·Biomedical Engineering
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.
Minjie Wu
University of Pittsburgh, PA·Neuroscience
Test whether women show faster cerebrovascular aging than men. Use 7T MRI measures of blood-brain barrier function, small artery and vein shape (VesselMapper, BrainVein) and white matter hyperintensities.
Hyunsuk Shim
Emory University, GA·Biomedical Engineering
Develop rapid, motion-robust spectroscopic MRI scans of the whole brain that improve image quality for detecting infiltrating brain tumor.
The school
University of Minnesota: 88 labs on PI Pages, $1.4B a year on research, 722 research doctorates a year.
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