Visitors Talk: Dunja Simicic, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine

About the speaker

Dunja completed her PhD in Physics at EPFL in the Laboratory of Functional and Metabolic Imaging and the CIBM Center for Biomedical Imaging in 2022, under the supervision of Dr. Cristina Cudalbu and Prof. Rolf Gruetter. Following her PhD, she became a research staff scientist at CIBM. In 2023, she joined the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Department of Radiology and Radiological Science, as a postdoctoral fellow. Her work has since focused on developing novel methods to process, model, and quantify in vivo MR Spectroscopy (MRS) data using OSPREY—an all-in-one toolbox for MRS data processing. She has also contributed to ongoing efforts to improve water and metabolite relaxation time estimates, thereby optimizing metabolite quantification and advancing the clinical applications of MRS.

In this talk, she will present a new 2D modeling module in OSPREY and its current applications for in vivo MRS data, specifically a new paradigm to replace conventional frequency and phase correction of multi-transient data with a holistic 2D model. Furthermore, she will discuss a novel data-driven approach for deciding the basis set composition using Bayesian Information Criteria (BIC). Finally, she will highlight her recent efforts to establish MRS as a diagnostic criterion for IDH-mutated gliomas.