Visitors Talk: Diana Rotaru, Medical University of Vienna & Jamie Near, University of Toronto

Abstract

Technical limitations and lack of standardization led to an unmet need to characterize metabolic changes in the pancreas using in vivo 1H-MRS. The aim of this study is to establish a processing, analysis, and quantification pipeline for pancreas MRS data that aligns with current consensus guidelines and state-of-the-art methodology. A mouse model of pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma was used to test and validate this framework. The results of the proposed pipeline provide a preliminary validation of its quantitative potential.

About the speaker

Diana Rotaru is a postdoctoral researcher in the laboratory of Prof. Christoph Juchem at the Center for Medical Physics and Biomedical Engineering, Medical University of Vienna, Austria. Her research primarily focuses on Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopy (MRS) of the human and animal brain, with a recent extension to applications in the pancreas.
Dr. Rotaru earned a BSc in Medical Engineering from the University Politehnica of Bucharest, Romania, followed by an MSc in Neuroimaging and a PhD in Neuroimaging Physics from King’s College London, UK. During her postgraduate training, she specialized in the acquisition, processing, and analysis of γ-aminobutyric acid (GABA) and glutathione (GSH) in the human brain. In parallel, she conducted studies on chemical shift displacement error and evaluated correction strategies. Her work also included investigations of GABA detection in rodents using both conventional and spectral-editing MRS sequences.
Following her PhD, Dr. Rotaru joined the Adaptive Brain Lab, led by Prof. Zoe Kourtzi at the University of Cambridge, UK, where she focused on hippocampal MRS. Prior to relocating to Vienna, she was a member of the MR SCIENCE Lab, led by Christoph Juchem at Columbia University in New York, USA, where she began the investigation of the pancreas using MRS.