The following content has been provided by the University of Erlangen-Nürnberg.

So good morning everybody.

We will continue today with the introduction, very basic information on medical imaging

and medical imaging processing.

And then I want to provide a refresher course on linear algebra.

I will introduce one important tool that we are going to use heavily and I want to make

sure that you have a good understanding of this particular method.

So yesterday we made clear, you're all smiling, you know what's going to come, right?

Yesterday we made clear what morphological imaging is.

If somebody tells you I do morphological imaging, that basically means you work on the visualization

of anatomy, right?

And in this context, another imaging method is very important that appears to be quite

popular these days.

So if you go to conferences and if you talk to important people, they all do molecular

imaging.

And molecular imaging is basically describing methods to show chemical processes in the

human body.

In early days we called this more or less functional imaging.

But nowadays we call it molecular imaging.

It sounds way smarter and it's more attractive to people.

The same is with nuclear medicine.

I mean that sounds like a nuclear bomb is going to fall down and today they call it

molecular imaging.

We have to get a nuclear image of you.

Then people tend to avoid this and if you say we need to visualize the molecular processes

using highly advanced molecular imaging methods, then it's way more appreciated.

So molecular imaging is about the imaging and visualization processes and changes in

the organisms on the molecular level.

And typical modalities to do that are positron emission tomographs.

We will not go into the details.

There is some radioactive material and sending out some rays with certain energy that can

be measured.

Single photon emission computed tomography, SPECT is another way to show where the metabolism

in the human body happens and functional magnetic resonance imaging is also one important method.

So magnetic resonance imaging can be used for morphological and molecular imaging or

functional imaging.

That's important.

That's a modality that goes basically across the borderlines of these two disciplines.

In early days it was also called NMR, nuclear magnetic resonance imaging.

Nobody is using the term nuclear anymore.

It does not mean that the method has changed.

No it's just a psychological trick that is applied here.

Molecular imaging relies on concurrent advances in molecular medicine.

That's a discipline in medicine.

Maybe you know that here at our fantastic university we were the first university in

Germany where you were able to study molecular medicine, nuclear medicine, chemistry, computer

science, imaging science and engineering.

Where is medical engineering?

That's all.

All of that is medical engineering.