Weekly update

Hello All, Two things this week 1) The will be a seminar held in the Chemistry Department this week that may interest users: Dr Luisa Ciobanu: Functional MRI at ultra-high magnetic fields Wednesday 4th October 13.00-14.00 In room Chemistry/B101 Abstract Despite the fact that BOLD-fMRI is routinely used to map brain activity and connectivity in preclinical and clinical settings its exact relation with the underlying microscopic changes, either vascular or neuronal, is still not fully elucidated. The development of high magnetic fields promise substantial improvements in the contrast to noise ratio and the spatial resolution with which functional MRI maps are acquired possibly allowing the comparison with other, microscopic, techniques. In the first part of my talk I will review the advantages, but also the challenges, imposed by imaging at ultra-high magnetic fields. Following this, I will present recent results demonstrating that BOLD fMRI faithfully reports microvascular hyperemia, and that the detection of the smallest neuronal activation is limited only by its sensitivity. Beside improved BOLD acquisitions, high magnetic fields allow the development of other alternative ways for studying neuronal activation. In the last part of my presentation, I will describe a novel metabolic imaging approach, based on Chemical Exchange Saturation Transfer (CEST), for assessing the changes induced by neuronal stimulation in rat brains at 17.2T. Specifically, I will present images acquired under glucose-sensitizing conditions showing a significant negative contrast that highlights the same brain regions as those activated in conventional BOLD maps. 2) We are to give 'Tips of the week', hopefully, as the name suggests on a weekly basis. This will largely give advice on IT tricks and work-arounds for commonly occurring analysis tasks. Here's this week's: Scenario: You've submitted a load of jobs to the cluster which you find out will be of no use to you and you want to bring them to a halt. Solution typing: qdel -u <username> into a terminal will stop all cluster jobs submitted by that user, e.g. qdel -u ddc506 Best wishes Tony -- Antony Morland, PhD. Director, York Neuroimaging Centre Department of Psychology, University of York, York YO10 5DD, UK.