Biography
Dr. Jun Hua
Dr. Jun Hua
Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, USA
Title: Novel functional MRI technique for presurgical mapping in the presence of metallic implants and large susceptibility artifacts
Abstract: 
Presurgical functional mapping is currently the most prevalent clinical application of fMRI. Signal dropouts and distortions caused by susceptibility effects in the current standard echo-planar-imaging (EPI) based fMRI images are well-known problems, and have been a major hurdle for the application of fMRI in several brain regions, many of which are related to language mapping in presurgical planning. Such artifacts are particularly problematic in patients with previous surgical resection cavities, craniotomy hardware, hemorrhage, and vascular malformation. A recently developed T2-prepared (T2prep) fMRI approach showed negligible distortion and dropouts in the entire brain even in the presence of large susceptibility effects. We show that this approach provides an alternative method for performing fMRI in brain regions with large susceptibility effects.
Biography: 
Dr. Hua’s research has centered on the development and application of novel MRI technologies for in vivo functional and physiological imaging in the brain. These include the development of human and animal MRI methods to measure functional brain activities, cerebral perfusion and oxygen metabolism at high (3 Tesla) and ultra-high (7 Tesla and above) magnetic fields. He is particularly interested in novel MRI approaches to image small blood and lymphatic vessels in the brain. Collaborating with clinical investigators, these techniques have been applied to detect functional, vascular and metabolic abnormalities in the brain in neurodegenerative diseases.