A six-month Fulbright-Saastamoinen Foundation Grant provided a collaboration boost between Shalom Michaeli, Ph.D., professor at the Center for Magnetic Resonance Research (CMRR) at the University of Minnesota and Olli Gröhn, Ph.D., professor and director of the magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) unit and vice director of the A.I. Virtanen Institute for Molecular Science at Kuopio Campus at the University of Eastern Finland.
“During my time in Finland, we made significant progress in establishing MRI biomarkers for Parkinson’s disease (PD) and multiple sclerosis (MS),” said Michaeli. “Noninvasive MRI rotating frame relaxation contrasts developed at the CMRR in close collaboration with the Kuopio team are highly sensitive to slow motion, and could probe critically important processes, such as demyelination, and could serve as noninvasive biomarkers for PD and MS.”
Several joint projects had been initiated and are currently successfully running in collaboration with private companies.
The CMRR is world renowned for its contributions to methodology developments for high field MRI. The magnetic resonance group at the A.I Virtanen Institute under the guidance of Grӧhn has a unique approach of combining expertise in neurosciences and MRI.
While in Finland, Michaeli and his colleagues initiated an additional project using functional MRI (fMRI) and resting state fMRI to test in animals new paradigms for deep brain stimulation (DBS) which are based on modulated electric fields.
“This project is highly innovative and is critical for human health,” Shalom explains. “We will continue this project both at the CMRR and A.I . Virtanen Institute, combining our efforts and aiming to develop more selective and safer DBS methods.”
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