Imaging Software Company Brainspp has signed a license agreement with the Center for Magnetic Resonance Research (CMRR) of the University of Minnesota to commercialize a tool for simplifying magnetic resonance spectroscopy (MRS).
MrS measures the chemical composition of brain tissue. While traditional MRI shows the structure of the brain, Mrs offers information about the biochemistry of the brain. The challenge surrounding MRS is that users must select a specific area of the brain for certain studies for collecting data. Historically, this has led to the imaging modality being seen as too challenging, making some researchers “too afraid to even try”, according to the CEO of Brainspec and co-founder Alex Zimmerman.
“I saw spectroscopy as an immense clinical promise and potential, but translating has traditionally been a challenge if there is no scientist or an image laboratory to interpret it. Our goal was to use this type of technology easier,” Zimmerman said Network for medical devices.
To resolve the challenges surrounding the use of MRS, Brainspec worked together with the Spectroscopy Division at CMRR, which developed a car volume of interest (Autovoi), a tool designed to automate the selection of brain regions for MRS.
“I am a chemist and physicist through training, so I was of course inclined to study neurochemistry with neurodegenerative diseases, and my group has put a lot of work to make these methods easier for the MR technologist to simplify the data collection, for example, and that is where our interests came together and have overlapped,” Dr. Gülin Öz, director of the CMRR, the CMRR division of the CMRR division of the CMRR. Network for medical devices.
According to Dr. ÖZ can be considered autovoi as “GPS for spectroscopic imaging”.
“You do not have to rely on the expertise of the person who collects the spectroscopy data to place the attention volume on the brain images, but based on anatomical orientation points,” Öz explained.
“Autovoi makes the placement for you, reproducible, to increase the reliability and consistency of the data, so that it is interpretable between patients or healthy brains.”
“The approach is to make the card process easier, and therefore the general MRS process,” Zimmerman added.
To date, Autovoi has been used in a number of multi-site test ready-made research settings. Combined with Brainspec’s Artificial Intelligence (AI) -driven MRS platform, which received clearance from Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in 2023 in 2023, Brainspp hopes to translate the research ‘in product’ over time.
