Won-Jin Moon, MD, PhD

Clinical application of quantitative susceptibility mapping (QSM)

Quantitative susceptibility mapping (QSM) is a quantification map for local susceptibility based on multi-echo 3-dimensional GRE images. QSM can be used to evaluate metals in biological tissues such as iron and calcium.

Iron load in brain is potentially associated with neurodegenerative disease. Iron is a known component of Aβ plaques and neurofibrillary tangles, and moreover may provide an ideal environment for Aβ aggregation and neurotoxicity. Therefore, the use of QSM to measure iron levels in vivo may offer important information to assist our understanding of the neurodegenerative process.

QSM can be also useful to detect alterations in metal contents in various pathologic conditions including inflammation, hemorrhage, pathologic calcifications or in vivo quantification of gadolinium concentrations.

In this lecture, we discuss the current and emerging QSM applications in the diagnosis and management of various neurologic diseases.

Biography

Dr. Won-Jin Moon is working as a section chief of Neuroradiology at the Department of Radiology, Konkuk University Medical Center and a professor at the Department of Radiology, Konkuk University School of Medicine. She completed her radiology residency from Hanyang University Medical Center and subsequently trained in Neuroradiology at Samsung Medical Center. She had studied as a visiting scholar at the Institut für Neuroradiologie, Johann W. Goethe Universität Klinikum, Germany from 1999 to 2000 and at the Department of Radiology, Duke University Medical Center from 2009 to 2010.

Her clinical activity has focused on imaging diagnosis of neurodegenerative diseases, neurovascular diseases, neuro-oncology and demyelinating diseases.

Her research interest focuses on the application and development of advanced neuroimaging techniques for neurodegenerative diseases, including functional MR imaging (task-related and task-free), diffusion-tensor imaging, perfusion-weighted imaging (dynamic susceptibility contrast, dynamic contrast enhanced, and arterial spin labeling), susceptibility weighted imaging as well as quantitative structural imaging analysis..