VA Advanced Imaging Research Center

TheVA Advanced Imaging Research Center (VAARC) operates under an end-to-end research center model where

• participant recruitment,
• clinical and cognitive assessments,
• imaging protocol development,
• data acquisition, storage, management, processing and analysis could happen under one single organizational umbrella.

The strength of the Center is in the diversity and expertise of its staff. Our research group is composed not just of clinicians, but physicists and computer scientists who are largely focused on developing new techniques and improving our ability to acquire and analyze data. We also have an informatics teams who facilitate development and successful completion of these projects and administration personnel to support the process. This organizational structure makes us productive.

We are in an era where diseases are rarely conceptualized in a single system model. Fostering scientific interaction between clinicians and researchers with diverse specialties is extremely important for us to be leaders in clinical translational research and ultimately to better serve our veterans.

• High Field Imaging Center - Joseph An Vu, PhD
• Medical Imaging Informatics & Artificial Intelligence - Duygu Tosun-Turgut, PhD
• Neural Connectivity Lab -  Pratik Mukherjee, MD, PhD
• Vascular Imaging Research Center - David Saloner, PhD 

1. Focus on Three Clinical Pillars: Neurological, Musculoskeletal, and Cardiovascular are the top areas where biomedical imaging research at VA Medical Center in San Francisco can have impact on care of veterans. Determine the need for infrastructure and informatics to support these clinical pillars.
2. Combine Core Infrastructure and Informatics Support: Advanced Imaging and Artificial Intelligence are the critical technical strengths for informatics. Offer these under the CBI2 umbrella. Share these capabilities across our three clinical research pillars. Often, the technical tools have commonalities and synergies across medical areas/clinical pillars.

To mirror the research structure of the Radiology Department in an effort to clearly define responsibilities in a democratic leadership framework and to promote teamwork as we strengthen and broaden our unique VA research program.

The major goals of this Alzheimer’s Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI) are to:

1. Develop improved methods, which will lead to uniform standards for acquiring longitudinal multisite MRI and PET data on patients with Alzheimer’s disease (AD), mild cognitive impairment (MCI), and controls.
2. Acquire a generally accessible data repository, which describes longitudinal changes in brain structure and metabolism. In parallel, acquire clinical, cognitive and biomarker data for validation of imaging surrogates.
3. Determine those methods, which provide maximum power to determine treatment effects in trials involving these patient populations.

The Dementia Research Group, London will perform image analysis of MR scans a) for the initial preparation phase of the study and support ongoing assurance of MR acquisition quality and stability and b) to provide atrophy rate measurements of all 0,6 and 12 month scans. Consistency of MR acquisition is essential for meaningful analyses of change. To this end each MR site will need to demonstrate that, in addition to performing scans of sufficient quality, they are also able to perform sufficiently reproducible acquisitions throughout the study. Each site will be assessed with registration of serial imaging of real subjects at the preparation/qualification phase and then again prior to every time point. Control, AD and MCI subjects will be rescanned at each site and the scan-rescan pairs will be accurately registered (positionally matched). Short interval scan pairs will be used to detect MR machine noise (same day scans), machine drift and operator consistency (1-2 week intervals).  All registered scans will be analyzed to detect changes in acquisition parameters, image contrast and homogeneity or voxel dimensions and brain volume differences. Normative data will be used to define acceptable levels of variance and rates of change. In conjunction with other members of the consortium working on MR quality assurance, Dr Fox will work closely with the sites to correct problems that occur in terms of variation in acquisition. Registration-based measures of rate of brain atrophy and ventricular change (using the boundary shift integral) will be derived from all 200 AD and 400 MCI subjects and 200 controls for 0,6 and 12 month time point structural MR scans. Rates of change will be available for comparison with other MR and PET analyses and with the clinical measures. All pre-processing steps and brain regions derived as part of image processing will be made fully accessible.

Brain Health Registry

• Scanners
• Recharge rates
• MR study application
• MR user certification
• MR scheduling

Jerry Matson, PhD (August 25, 1938 – February 19, 2023)

Those of us who were fortunate enough to know Jerry Matson were very saddened to learn that he passed away in February 2023 following hospitalization for Covid.

Jerry did his PhD training in physical chemistry with Edward Stejskal in 1967, at UW Madison, and a postdoc with Tom Gerig at UC Santa Barbara. Later, when he was the NMR facility manager at UC Davis, Jerry first became involved in what was at the time called “in vivo NMR.” Tom Schleich was very interested in NMR spectroscopy of the eye and developed a collaboration with Jerry to use Rf field profiling to obtain spectra from localized regions. Mike Garwood was a graduate student doing this work for his PhD Thesis. This was the beginning of Jerry’s (and Mike’s) career-long interest in developing and optimizing rf pulses for experimental and clinical use. It is hard to think of another scientist who truly loved all aspects of MRI as much as Jerry.

In 1986 Jerry moved to UCSF joining our group at the VA Medical Center to create and build the Magnetic Resonance Unit. Jerry was the NMR expert and while at UCDavis/UCSF, he mentored or interacted with many scientists on hardware/pulse sequence issues who went on to their own independent careers. To name a few: Alan Koretsky, Greg Karczmar, Dieter Meyerhoff, Michael Boska, Hoby Hetherington, Joyce Suhy. Andrew Maudsley, Don Twieg, and Norbert Schuff, along with dozens of postdoctoral fellows and research assistants, were close collaborators. Jerry authored and co-authored countless abstracts, published papers and presented at meetings. Jerry is particularly known for the pulse simulation software called “Matpulse” which is still in use today. Years ago, Jerry was recognized at a special surprise party in his honor at our home, held when ISMRM was in San Francisco.

Jerry was devoted to his wife Diana whom he met while in Madison Wi. Diana developed medical issues, requiring more and more of Jerry’s care. Then an additional tragedy struck when their home was completely destroyed by the “Tubbs Fire” in Santa Rosa Ca, and they managed to narrowly escape with the clothes on their back, two suitcases, and their pets. I will never forget Jerry’s description of how they woke in the middle of the night to see their neighbor’s roof aflame, quickly pulled on some clothes, ran out of the house and drove through a smoke-filled burning landscape of horror.

During his later years, his twin sister wrote us “from our many discussions I know how much he enjoyed his work with MRI and the people at the VA. He glowed when he talked about those years and his work.”

Jerry and I worked very closely together for many hours each day at the San Francisco VA Medical Center affiliated with UCSF, especially in the early years of “whole body MRI/MRS” from 1986 onward extending into recent years. I understood some of the medical and biological questions that NMR could answer, and Jerry understood the feasibility of the technology. We especially bonded when making many trips to visit the Philips team in Eindhoven. We learned a lot from each other about science and about life.

For those of us who were fortunate enough to know and work with Jerry, he was a beautiful man. He didn’t have a mean or cruel bone in his body. He was a really good person who cared about others, which made him a very devoted teacher, mentor and collaborator. He also had an extremely strong fundamental knowledge about NMR including the theory, construction of the hardware including magnets, gradients, and coils, and the pulses and software programming behind imaging sequences. Jerry was known as an exceptional resource to our lab, with his vast knowledge of NMR and MRI. His life as a scientist and as a person serves as an inspiration to all of us.

By Michael W. Weiner, MD