Tudor Iones­cu

Func­tion­al Ultra­sound for the In Vivo Mon­i­tor­ing of Phar­ma­co­log­i­cal Effects

Abstract

Over the last cou­ple of decades, func­tion­al mag­net­ic res­o­nance imag­ing has emerged as the gold-stan­dard method to inves­ti­gate brain activ­i­ty and func­tion­al con­nec­tiv­i­ty in vivo and at whole-brain lev­el in both humans and ani­mals. While fMRI is undoubt­ed­ly dri­ving for­ward our under­stand­ing of brain func­tion, it does suf­fer from the con­vo­lut­ed, incom­plete­ly under­stood nature of its blood-oxy­gena­tion-lev­el-derived (BOLD) sig­nal and from its poor­er sen­si­tiv­i­ty com­pared to oth­er imag­ing meth­ods. More recent­ly, func­tion­al ultra­sound (fUS) has emerged as a pow­er­ful alter­na­tive to fMRI. While not yet ful­ly trans­la­tion­al, fUS has shown great promise to out­per­form fMRI with regards to spa­tiotem­po­ral res­o­lu­tion and sen­si­tiv­i­ty. Being also eas­i­er to han­dle, house and much less expen­sive than MRI, could fUS be a bet­ter option than fMRI for func­tion­al brain imag­ing in the future?

The lec­ture will cov­er the prin­ci­ples of fUS, present direct com­par­isons with fMRI, as well as appli­ca­tions of fUS to mon­i­tor phar­ma­co­log­i­cal effects of dif­fer­ent class­es of com­pounds, thus aim­ing to pro­vide a com­pre­hen­sive pic­ture of the present and a glimpse into the future of this promis­ing new imag­ing technology.

Biog­ra­phy

Tudor Iones­cu com­plet­ed his B.Sc. in Med­ical Engi­neer­ing at the Uni­ver­si­ties of Stuttgart and Tue­bin­gen (2011 – 2014), fol­lowed by an M.Sc. in Bio­med­ical Tech­nolo­gies from the Uni­ver­si­ty of Tue­bin­gen (2014 – 2017). He obtained PhD at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Tue­bin­gen (2017 – 2022), where his research focused on explor­ing brain func­tion through simul­ta­ne­ous PET/MRI imag­ing. Since 2022, he has been a Post­Doc spe­cial­iz­ing in Func­tion­al Ultra­sound at Boehringer Ingelheim.