"Clinical Applications of Arterial Spin-Label MRI"

11th Annual T. Hans Newton Lecture

Joseph Maldjian, MD
Professor of Radiology and Biomedical Engineering
Section Chief, Neuroradiology
Vice Chair of Research in Radiology
Director of the Advanced Neuroscience Imaging Research (ANSIR) Laboratory
Wake Forest University, Winston-Salem, North Carolina

Dr. Maldjian received his undergraduate degree from Princeton University in Biochemistry, completed medical school at the University of Medicine and Dentistry in New Jersey, followed by an internship in Internal Medicine, completed a diagnostic radiology residency at Mount Sinai Medical Center in NY, and completed a 2-year neuroradiology fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania.  He has been a neuroradiologist on staff at UMDNJ, the University of Pennsylvania, and most recently at  Wake Forest University since 2001.  His background as a neuroradiologist is unique, with expertise in interpretation of all neuroimaging modalities, detailed knowledge of advanced MR analysis methods (including volumetric analysis, fMRI, perfusion and diffusion tensor analysis), as well as extensive expertise in software development for a variety of neuroimaging processing applications. Dr. Maldjian has been funded through the NIH for development of the highly successful pickatlas software package for automated region-of-interest based analysis, as well as the Biologic Parametric Mapping toolbox for multimodal image analysis. He is currently funded for a study of imaging, genetics and cognitive function in diabetes.  Dr. Maldjian has been involved in functional MRI studies since the inception of this technology in the early 1990’s, developing interfaces between real-time neurosurgical workstations and functional MRI, and publishing several of the early articles validating fMRI against intraoperative mapping using these interfaces. Dr. Maldjian’s lab at Wake Forest has been at the forefront of functional imaging processing methods, implementing a fully automated processing pipeline in 2001 including features such as distributed grid processing, automated error recovery, and data provenance.  This has enabled Wake Forest to become the leading institution in the world in clinical Arterial Spin Label (ASL) imaging, with seamless translation of image acquisition, automated post-processing, and insertion into the Picture Archiving and Display System (PACS), with over 15000 clinical ASL MRI studies performed over the last 3 years. His lab’s focus is on multimodal high dimensional methods for imaging data analysis using machine learning techniques, functional network connectivity and graph theory, as well as integration with non-image based data with the ultimate aim toward clinical diagnostic translation.