Guest Lecture: PET/MRI and MRI for the improved identification of peripheral pain generators

Join Dr. Sharmila Majumdar as she hosts Dr. Daehyun Yoon, Physical Science Research Scientist at Stanford University.  Dr. Yoon's talk will be on PET/MRI and MRI for the improved identification of peripheral pain generators.  The abstract is below.

Pain now affects more people than cancer, diabetes, and heart disease combined in the U.S. It is a leading cause of disability and costs annually more than $600B for healthcare expenses and lost productivity. Unfortunately, treatments are only effective 30% of the time partly due to our limited capability in pinpointing the causative source of pain, or pain generators. For example, structural abnormalities identified by conventional clinical imaging have been often unrelated to pain, resulting in unnecessary treatments and poor outcomes at the high added expense. In this talk, I will present our recent developments of PET/MRI and MRI methods for the improved visualization and characterization of peripheral pain generators. Molecular imaging with PET offers an opportunity to directly track inflammatory processes causing pain, facilitating the detection of a wide variety of peripheral pain generators. Our MRI developments have focused on high-resolution 3D imaging of peripheral nerves and prosthetic joints for the detailed visualization and specific characterization of associated pain generators. I will introduce the application of our imaging techniques to pain conditions involving joints and peripheral nerves, which showed promise of improved perioperative pain management.

Zoom securely >  LINK