Advanced Clinical MRI of the Kidney - Methods and Protocols

This book offers the concepts of quantitative MRI for kidney imaging. Kidney MRI holds incredible promise for making a quantum leap in improving diagnosis and care of patients with a multitude of diseases, by moving beyond the limitations and restrictions of current routine clinical practice. Clinical kidney MRI is advancing with ever increasing rapidity, and yet, it is still not good enough. Several roadblocks still slow the pace of progress, particularly inefficient education of renal MR researchers, and lack of harmonization of approaches that limits the sharing of results among multiple research groups.

With the help of this book, we aim to address these limitations, by providing a comprehensive collection of more chapters on MRI methods that serve as a foundational resource for clinical kidney MRI studies. This includes chapters describing the fundamental principles underlying a variety of kidney MRI methods, step-by-step protocols for executing kidney MRI studies, and detailed guides for post-processing and data analysis. This collection serves as a crucial part of a roadmap towards conducting kidney MRI studies in a robust and reproducible way, that promotes the standardization and sharing of data, and ultimately, clinical translation.

Chapters are divided into three parts: MRI physics and acquisition protocols, post-processing and data analysis methods, and clinical applications. The first section includes MRI physics background and describe a detailed step by step MRI acquisition protocol. If a clinician would like to perform a renal MRI - this would include the parameters to set up the acquisition on the scanner. By this section, the reader should have the details to be able to successfully collect human renal MR images. In the second section, expert authors describe methods on how to post-process and analyze the data. By this section, the reader should have the details to be able to successfully generate quantitative data from the human renal MR images. In the final section, chapters show clinical examples of various methods. Authors share examples of multi-parametric renal MRI that are being used in clinical practice.

This is an ideal guide for clinicians from radiology, nephrology, physiology, clinical scientists, and as well as basic scientists and experts in imaging sciences and physics of kidney MRI. It also provides an opportunity to students, trainees, and post-doctoral fellows to learn about these kidney MRI techniques.

For the past 20 years, Dr. Suraj D. Serai, PhD is an MRI Physicist, Research Scientist and Associate Professor of Radiology. Dr. Serai received his MS and PhD degrees in Bio-engineering from the University of Illinois, Chicago, in 2004 and 2007, respectively. He got his bachelor's degree in the Biomedical engineering in 2000 from Mumbai University in Mumbai, India. His first job from 1999 to 2003 was as an Engineer for Philips Medical Systems in Mumbai, India. From 2008 to 2010 he was the MRI Manager at the National Institute of Aging, National Institute of Health in Baltimore, Maryland. Prior to this he worked for 4 years as Research Assistant at the University of Illinois in Chicago, Illinois. For the past 10 years, Dr. Serai has been working as the MR physicist. He has developed and applied MR imaging-based methods for iron quantification, fat quantification, 31P spectroscopy, UTE, elastography, T1 mapping, T2 mapping, and diffusion-based techniques. In his day-to-day duties, he provides assistance in quantitative body MR project design, interpretation and analysis of MR imaging data. These studies are of direct relevance to the clinical practice of radiology. 
Kassa Darge, MD, PhD, DTM&P, FSAR, FESUR, is Chair of the Department of Radiology and Radiologist-in-Chief at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. He is a Professor of Radiology at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, and currently holds the William L. Van Alen Endowed Chair in Pediatric Radiology. Darge is also an Honorary Professor of Radiology in the Department of Radiology at Addis Ababa University in Ethiopia.
Prior to coming to CHOP, Darge served as the Chair of the Department of Pediatric Radiology at the University of Wuerzburg in Germany. He has an extensive research portfolio encompassing 28 years with over 200 publications and multiple grants. His research focus is on innovative and advanced body imaging methods, particularly in magnetic resonance and ultrasound modalities. 
Dr. Darge has mentored several trainees and has received many awards for his research and educational work. Of note is his work to establish the CHOP Radiology International Education Outreach pediatric radiology fellowship program in Ethiopia. To further CHOP's mission of training the next generation of pediatric experts, he also started a mentoring program for junior faculty members in the Department of Radiology for which he was awarded the CHOP mentor award.
Dr. Darge received his medical degree from Addis Ababa University in Ethiopia and the University of Heidelberg in Germany. He completed his residency in radiology and fellowship in pediatric radiology as well as his PhD at the University of Heidelberg. In addition, he completed a research fellowship with the World Health Organization in Tropical Medicine at the Bernhard Nocht Institute for Tropical Medicine in Hamburg, Germany, where he practiced tropical medicine and conducted research in the institution's outposts in West Africa. Dr. Darge is actively involved in all major radiologic and pediatric radiologic societies