Multimodal Metabolic Brain Imaging Lab (Li Lab)

The Multimodal Metabolic Brain Imaging Lab (Li Lab) is focused on developing methods for obtaining reliable metabolic information from the brain in order to characterize spatial and temporal heterogeneity and the biologic behavior during disease time course and treatment. Specifically, this includes:

1. Developing new methods for acquiring, processing and quantifying the spatial distribution of in vivo ¹H MR metabolic profiles with high spatial resolution and whole brain coverage within clinical feasible acquisition time at both 3T and 7T scanners;
2. Developing tools for generating metrics of brain neurotransmitters (glutamate, GABA and glutathione) to evaluate their roles in neurologic and psychiatric diseases;
3. Integrating steady state ¹H metabolic metrics with PET, hyperpolarized ¹³C and advanced MR imaging parameters in order to elucidate the underlying normal biological processes and to improve clinical evaluation of patients with glioma.