On Thursday, 8 January 2026, CIBM was delighted to host Jessie Mosso from the Grossman School of Medicine, New York University, for the first Visitors Talk of 2026. Jessie gave a presentation entitled “Insights into human white matter microstructure from water and metabolites diffusion”
The session, hosted by Cristina Cudalbu, CIBM PCI EPFL Section Head, brought together more than 35 researchers both online and in person at the CIBM seminar room in EPFL, Lausanne.
Insights into human white matter microstructure from water and metabolites diffusion
Diffusion MRI (dMRI) of water offers exquisite sensitivity to brain microstructure but lacks intra-cellular specificity, as water is present in all cell types and exchanges between compartments. Diffusion 1H MR spectroscopy (dMRS) probes metabolites that are almost exclusively located in the intracellular space and are partially cell type-specific.
On a 3T clinical scanner, we compared 1) diffusion time-dependence of neuronal/glial metabolites and water, and 2) diffusion tensors and fiber orientation distribution functions (fODF) obtained from spherical deconvolution for metabolites measured with dMRS, and water with dMRI. Microscopic signatures of structural disorder along “sticks” and mesoscopic fascicle alignment in a large white matter voxel were similar between water and neuronal metabolites, but not glial metabolites. This cell type-specific in vivo information could help investigate white matter alterations with specificity to different pathological processes.
Finally, I will present the first images acquired with the Siemens Connectom.X 3T scanner (500mT/m gradient strength, 600T/m/s slew rate), recently installed at NYU and offering new avenues for human brain microstructure imaging.
Jessie Mosso
Grossman School of Medicine, New York University
Jessie Mosso graduated from an engineering school in France and obtained a master’s degree in Physics (ESPCI Paris) and in Neuroscience (Sorbonne Université, Paris) in 2019. During her graduate studies, she conducted research projects on the topic of dissolution dynamic nuclear polarization (d-DNP) at UC San Francisco and École Normale Supérieure, Paris.
Jessie joined EPFL in September 2019 to start a PhD in the CIBM and LIFMET under the supervision of Dr. Cristina Cudalbu and Prof. Rolf Gruetter. Her thesis research consists in the implementation of diffusion weighted spectroscopy (DWS) and imaging (DWI) at 14.1T to probe brain microstructure alterations in a preclinical model of hepatic encephalopathy (HE). Subprojects of her thesis involve FDG-PET imaging to study energy metabolism in chronic hepatic encephalopathy and validations of PCA denoising techniques for MRS data.
She defended her PhD thesis in 2023, and continued to pursue her research interests as a CIBM research staff till mid-2024. In 2024 Jessie became a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at New York University Grossman School of Medicine.