Speaker: Matthan Caan ( Biomedical Engineering & Physics, Amsterdam UMC)
Topic: Micro to macro: visualizing microscale pathology with MRI
Abstract: Neurological and oncological diseases affect the body and brain at multiple scales: from cells, to organs, to the whole body. A major problem in biocomputation is combining data from these different scales of measurement, particularly when wanting to create new effective treatments. The end goal of this project is to develop computational techniques that bridge the microscale and macroscale in neurological and oncological diseases.
Many treatments for oncological and neurological diseases are ‘shooting in the dark’: monitoring of cellular pathology, like Alzheimer pathology or cell division in cancer, is almost impossible without invasive procedures such as biopsies. We aim to use macroscale, non-invasive Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) to visualise microscale pathology. Using Artificial Intelligence (AI), we will create “MRI microscope models”, which are able to pick up on cellular pathology based on macroscale/MRI images. These MRI microscope models exploit deep learning techniques in a new way, making use of unique multiscale data.