Ofer Pasternak, PhD
Assistant Professor, Departments of Psychiatry and Radiology,
Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School

Free-water Imaging is a recent diffusion MRI technique that quantifies water molecules that are free to diffuse in the extracellular space. Eliminating free-water provides signal sensitive to changes in brain tissue itself, improving the specificity of the popular diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) method. At the same time, quantifying the amount of free-water is emerging as an important clinical marker, allowing the identification of extracellular changes that could be related to neuroinflammation and atrophy. In this talk I will present free-water imaging and its utility in separating brain tissue related and extracellular related changes in various neurodegenerative and psychiatric brain disorders, such as Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer’s disease, schizophrenia and traumatic brain injuries.