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Professor Zhi-Pei Liang, Franklin W. Woeltge Professor, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Co-chair, Integrative Imaging Theme, Beckman Institute, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, gave a lecture on September 12, 2016 titled “Molecular Imaging Using Intrinsic MR Signals: A Path to High Resolution through Subspaces”.

Molecular imaging has been a dream of biomedical imaging scientists for decades. However, most existing molecular imaging techniques require exogenous molecular probes or reporters to be introduced into a subject to obtain molecule-specific information, thereby limiting their practical utility. Magnetic resonance spectroscopic imaging (MRSI) has been recognized as a potential powerful tool for noninvasive metabolic studies of biological systems but clinical and research applications of this technology have been developing very slowly. Conventional MRSI methods represent the desired spatiospectral function as a vector in a very high-dimensional space. As a result, the number of spatiospectral encodings required for decoding (or image reconstruction) can be huge, resulting in long data acquisition time, or poor spatial resolution, or low signal-to-noise ratio. It can be justified that the spatiospectral functions of real biological systems reside in a very low-dimensional subspace. This property can be effectively utilized to accelerate MRSI experiments and achieve high resolution. This talk discussed Prof. Liang’s recent advances in this exciting area of research.