OVERVIEW

International MRIlab - A One Year Journey From The Basics To Advanced Methodologies of MRI - Module I is organized by Excellence in Medical Education (EXCEMED) and will be held from Dec 11 - 12, 2020 at Siena, Tuscany, Italy.

Accreditation details
The International MRI Lab, Siena, Italy, 11/12/2020-12/12/2020, has been accredited by the European Accreditation Council for Continuing Medical Education (EACCME®) with 14 (fourteen) European CME credits (ECMEC®s). Each medical specialist should claim only those hours of credit that he/she actually spent in the educational activity.

Overview:
In demyelinating and neurodegenerative disorders such as multiple sclerosis (MS), magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) supports diagnostic and therapeutic decisions, assesses prognosis, and improves understanding of the disease. Standardisation and optimisation of MRI acquisition protocols and analysis are therefore critical, both in clinical and research settings. Quantitative methods assessing lesions and atrophy are far less subjective for measuring disease burden in MS, compared with visual inspection, and are moving from research into clinical settings. Structural damage is predictive of motor and cognitive disability and needs to be accurately quantified, also in order to measure response to treatment. Several methods for imaging post-processing have been developed over time with different strengths, limits and scopes. However, whereas quantitative MRI measures have been extensively used in clinical studies and as endpoints in clinical trials, their introduction in the clinical setting has been difficult due to a number of methodological issues.
EXCEMED together with the team of the University of Siena - Experimental Neurology Unit, Department of Medicine, Surgery and Neurosciences - and with the Vall d’Hebron University Hospital in Barcelona - Section of Neuroradiology and MRI Unit, Department of Radiology designed the MRILab - an international 12-month-training period for young neurologists and neuroradiologists particularly interested in quantitative neuroimaging applied to research in demyelinating and neurodegenerative disorders. The Lab is structured as follows:
• The first module will focus on MRI acquisition and imaging post-processing of the brain (lesions and volume)
• A remote tutoring programme provided by the members of the scientific committee and their teams will support the trainees in their research activities between the two modules by a message board on the MRILab dedicated page which will be accessible to all the participants to post questions and doubts.
• The second module, that will take place in 5 months from the first one, will focus on cortical lesions and volume and MRI acquisition and imaging post-processing of the spinal cord (lesions and volume).

Learning objectives:
Through a series of different educational formats - both live and online - the MRI-Lab, facing basic and advanced methodological key aspects related to the use of quantitative measures of lesions and atrophy, aims to achieve the following learning objectives:
• Illustrate the main issues in the standardisation and optimisation of MRI acquisition protocols
• Describe how to facilitate image post-processing
• Discuss strengths and limits of currently used software packages for image quantification
• Deliver full analysis of lesion burden and atrophy in MRI samples.