Grant: Canada Research Chairs

Pathologies of the nervous central system can induce severe functional disabilities (e.g., paralysis). Unfortunately, clinicians lack objective tools to assess the microstructural damage to axons, preventing them from choosing the optimal treatment for their patients. While recent developments of quantitative MRI (qMRI) have shown strong potentials to characterize microstructure, these new techniques remain far from the clinic due to the lack of validation and challenges inherent to data acquisition and processing. The proposed Chair intends to develop state-of-the-art qMRI tools to precisely assess microstructural damage, which will in turn become essential for clinical evaluation and objective assessment of treatment efficiency.