OxTalks will soon move to the new Halo platform and will become 'Oxford Events.' There will be a need for an OxTalks freeze. This was previously planned for Friday 14th November – a new date will be shared as soon as it is available (full details will be available on the Staff Gateway).
In the meantime, the OxTalks site will remain active and events will continue to be published.
If staff have any questions about the Oxford Events launch, please contact halo@digital.ox.ac.uk
From birth to death, neurons and glial cells morphologies evolve. They respond to environmental challenges (e.g. spine density and learning, activated microglia and infection etc) or can reflect an abnormal brain condition (e.g. astrocytic hypertrophy, neuronal atrophy, dendritic tree defects etc). Diffusion MRI provides insights about brain microstructure, from the water molecules constrained by cell membranes. However, water is ubiquitous, and its diffusion can hardly disentangle contributions from the extracellular space, glial cells or neurons for example. This is where diffusion-weighted MRS steps in! In this presentation, I will introduce a few applications in the healthy (developing) rodent brain and in a mouse model of astrocytic activation. This method exists both on animal and human scanners and facilitates translational perspectives. At WIN, it is already implemented on the rodent 7T MRI scanner, and it has been recently installed on the human 3T. Besides presenting the potential applications of diffusion weighted-MRS in neuroscience and psychology, this talk will be an opportunity to briefly highlight the work of some people from the Preclinical Imaging Group working with the rodent 7T here at Oxford, and facilitate connections with EP in case of matching research interests!