Lecturer: Frederik Barkhof (UCL CMIC and Amsterdam UMC)
MRI is the main imaging modality for the workup in many brain disorders, such as multiple sclerosis (MS), dementia, epilepsy, tumours. In daily Radiology practice, scans are evaluated using visual inspection and the support of rating scales. For research purposes, more sensitive and accurate quantitative image analysis methods have been developed, to determine brain atrophy, MS lesion burden and tumour growth for group analyses, as well as AI-based techniques for pattern recognition and classification. Currently, those sophisticated techniques – developed for group-wise comparisons – are not used in clinical patient care. This translational gap is hard to bridge due to differences between research versus clinical scan quality and lack of PACS environment integration. The Quantitative Neuroradiology Initiative (QNI) aims to bridge this gap by integrating quantification in the clinical workflow to allow patients to benefit from the tools developed by CMIC.
