Anna Chen has successfully defended her PhD thesis in biomedical imaging and technology at NYU Grossman School of Medicine. The defense was held on Monday, March 3, at NYU Langone Health.
Dr. Chen’s thesis focused on magnetic resonance spectroscopy in mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI, also known as concussion) and Alzheimer’s disease, and was advised by Ivan Kirov, PhD, associate professor at NYU Langone’s departments of radiology and neurology, and scientist at the Center for Advanced Imaging Innovation and Research.
Magnetic resonance spectroscopy (MRS) is an MRI technique that measures metabolites and delivers chemical information not available through structural, diffusion, or functional imaging. In the brain, MRS holds the potential to further the understanding and treatment of neuropathologies but has not seen wide clinical adoption. Dr. Chen’s doctoral research advances MRS through reproducibility studies and complex multivariate analyses.
In an ambitious 2023 study, Dr. Chen and colleagues replicated prior findings of MRS metrics in white matter injury correlated with clinical outcomes and found that “clinic-ready” MRS biomarkers for mTBI may be achieved with simple, “clinic-friendly” ways of performing MRS, although more evidence is needed to get there. In another, longitudinal study of people with mTBI, the team found that MRS “may help improve identification of those at risk for experiencing persistent post-concussive symptoms,” writes Dr. Chen in her thesis abstract. A third investigation has shown that in normal-appearing brain tissue MRS and sodium MRI have had the greatest sensitivity to white-matter and grey-matter injury, respectively, carrying “implications for … molecular imaging techniques for acute-to-subacute clinical monitoring” of mTBI.
Dr. Chen also led a 2024 study concluding that MRS has the potential to augment an Alzheimer’s biomarker framework known as A/T/N, especially when used in the hippocampus, an area known to be affected early in the course of the disease.
“A lot of neurodegenerative diseases are normal-appearing until it’s too late,” Dr. Chen told us in a 2022 Lab Talk as a PhD candidate. “Because spectroscopy can interrogate the chemistry of the brain, it has unique potential for early diagnosis.”
A version of this post first appeared on the CAI2R LinkedIn.
Related Publications
Replicability of proton MR spectroscopic imaging findings in mild traumatic brain injury: Implications for clinical applications.
Neuroimage Clin. 2023;37:103325. doi: 10.1016/j.nicl.2023.103325
Retrospective analysis of Braak stage- and APOE4 allele-dependent associations between MR spectroscopy and markers of tau and neurodegeneration in cognitively unimpaired elderly.
Neuroimage. 2024 Aug 15;297:120742. doi: 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2024.120742
Related Stories
Ivan Kirov, scientist who uses magnetic resonance spectroscopy as a window into the brain, talks about MRS, being methodical, and why drawing clear conclusions can be so challenging.
Anna Chen, PhD candidate in biomedical imaging, talks about what led her to research, why she's working with MR spectroscopy, and how she's learning about business.