Chemical Shift Imaging (CSI) provides clinicians with information about chemical environment inside the brain, which they can in turn use to make diagnoses. A significant downside of current CSI of infant brains is that only the inner area of the brain can be imaged; this is because full brain scans suffer from signal contamination caused by the fat that surrounds the skull. The goal of my SuperUROP project will be to design acquisition and post-processing methods to reduce the signal contamination caused by the fat, and provide clinicians with information about the chemical environment throughout the entire infant brain.

I am a course 6-2 Junior researching fetal and neo-natal MRI for my SuperUROP project. Summer 2014, I worked in a lab that developed MRI techniques for measuring the mechanical properties of brain tissue. I loved learning about MRI: it was everything cool in physics applied in a very elegant and practical way! My project also lets gives me exposure to a clinical setting, which is rare for course 6. I am very excited!