Lars Magnus Valnes: Brain, MRI and computational modeling.

The human brain has no lymphatic vessels, so how does the brain clear metabolic waste? In 2012, Iliff et al. proposed a theory about waste clearance of the brain, called the "glymphatic" theory. The theory suggest that the waste clearances is bio-mechanical, and that impaired clearance may be the cause of some neurodegenerative diseases and disorders. The inaccessibility of the human brain have been a hurdle in the research, as experiments on rat brains do not translate to the human brain. Researchers at Oslo university hospital Rikshospitalet have shown clearance using tracers visible in magnetic resonance images (MRI). However, the MRI only provide snapshots of different states in time, therefore computational modeling is needed to fill in the gaps. In this presentation, we will look at computational modeling with the MRI to infer material parameters in the brain.