KEYNOTE SPEAKER

MRI: From Multiparametric Contrast to Biomarker Imaging

Prof. Rudolf Stollberger
Graz University of Technology, Austria

Abstract

Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) has been established as a versatile morphological imaging modality with high spatial resolution and the best soft tissue contrast of all medical imaging techniques. It also has been developed to a method which can be used to get functional or even metabolic information. These developments are driven by the need of a better staging of diseases, characterization of disease subtypes or by applications in the field of treatment monitoring. MRI is now a multifunctional imaging technique which allows detecting biophysical or metabolic parameters that can be used as biomarker for the assessment of underlying biological processes in a wide variety of tissues and diseases. With nanoconstructs consisting of at least targeting molecules which bind specifically to molecular markers in the tissue or participate in a biological process and MR contrast agents, the method has developed even to a molecular imaging technique. The presentation will cover recent developments and applications of MRI for biomarker and molecular imaging as well as upcoming fields for MR biomarker imaging. It will also address the hot topic of ultra high field systems for biomarker applications with a discussion of its opportunities and challenges.

Biography of the Keynote Speaker

Rudolf Stollberger is a full professor for medical technology of the Institute for Medical Engineering at Graz University of Technology. His degrees are in electrical engineering and technical science from the Graz University of Technology (Dipl. Ing. 1984, PhD 1990). Professional experience includes Erwin-Schrödinger-Foreign Scholarship at the department of Biomedical Engineering on the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology at Zurich, assistant professorship at the Institute for Medical Physics at the University of Graz with habilitation for medical physics 1997, Associate Professor and head of the Section for MR-Physics at the Department of Radiology at the Medical University of Graz. Rudolf Stollberger is the current speaker of the Center of Biomedical Engineering at Graz University of Technology. He has published over sixty journal articles and at least 220 contributions to conference proceedings including invited journal articles and invited presentations at international meetings. He is a winner of the Stefan Schuy Award of the Austrian society for Biomedical Engineering and coauthor of several awarded presentations of students from his research group. His research interests include the development and improvement of imaging methods in medical diagnosis, in particular in the field of magnetic resonance (MR), the substitution of examination methods using ionizing radiation by MR procedures, digital image processing, modelling and simulation and the synoptic analysis of images with different information content from different modalities. At present the work focuses mainly on the determination of functional information and quantification of biophysical and pharmacokinetic parameters and all related technical, methodological and basic scientific aspects.