Special Lecture 1
Synergistic effect of diffusion weighting and MR spectroscopy

[SL01-2] Intracellular Metabolite Diffusion: a Handle for Probing Cell-specific Morphology and Metabolism.

*Ronen Itamar¹ (1. Clinical Imaging Sciences Center, Brighton and Sussex Medical School)

Itamar obtained his PhD in Physical Chemistry from the School of Chemistry in Tel Aviv University, where he worked with Prof. Gil Navon on developing a method for indirect NMR detection of 17-O with potential for metabolic imaging. While being a post-doc at the Center for Magnetic Resonance Research at the University of Minnesota, he developed a strong interest in diffusion-based contrast in MR. Itamar obtained his first academic position at the Boston University School of Medicine, and there, together with Dr. Dae-Shik Kim, he co-founded the Center for Biomedical Imaging. There he started his long affair with measurements of metabolite diffusion with diffusion-weighted magnetic resonance spectroscopy (DW-MRS) as potential markers for cell-specific microstructure and metabolism. In 2009 Itamar moved to the Netherlands, where he joined the C. J. Gorter Center for MRI at the Leiden University Medical Center (LUMC) as Associate Professor at the Department of Radiology. There he dedicated most of his time to developing methods for measuring diffusion of intracellular metabolites in humans at ultrahigh field. In collaboration with the low field MRI group at the LUMC led by Andrew Webb, he started recently also developing spectroscopic techniques suitable for ultralow field MR with focus on detection of lactate. Itamar moved to Brighton in the UK in 2021, and there he holds the positions of Academic Director of the Clinical Imaging Science Centre (CISC) and Chair in Medical Physics at the Brighton and Sussex Medical School.