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PhD candidates Judit Haász (University of Bergen) and Emilie Vallée (NTNU) received prizes for Best Oral Presentation and Best Poster, respectively, at the annual MedIm Conference.

 Establishment of vital networks for future innovative collaboration is of great importance to Nansen Neuroscience Network. A project promoting such networks among young scientists is MedIm – Norwegian Research School in Medical Imaging. Hosted by the Faculty of Medicine, NTNU, this is a consortium between all major imaging research groups in Norway, including universities, university hospitals and institutes.

Recently, the 3rd National PhD Conference in Medical Imagng was jointly organized in Oslo by MedIm and the intervention Centre (Oslo University Hospial and the University of Oslo). Seventy PhD candidatespresented their research through posters or oral presentstions.

Both the oral presentations and the posters were evaluated by scientific committees. Judit Haász (University of Bergen) was awarded NOK 10.000 for Best Oral Presentation. Her title was 'Longitudinal changes in the aging brain: Integrating cortical thickness, cortical volume and diffusion tensor imaging measures in context of the parieto-frontal integration theory of intelligence'. The study argues that a precise description of brain morphology changes related to healthy aging is essential to promote our understanding of age-related cognitive changes, and that longitudinal studies have the advantage that the individual subject will function as its own control.

Emilie Vallée (NTNU) won the NOK 5.000 Best Poster Award. The evaluation committee concluded that the poster not only presented important scientific results, but also represents a template for successful communication using the poster format. Her study poses the question 'Diffusion-weighted functional MRI: a new method for localizing brain activity with MRI?' Vallée demonstrates that the method of DfMRI does not have the necessary reliability to be used in brain activation studies, as earlier proposed by LeBihan and colleagues. Valleé found no real proof of neuronal diffusion process. Contrary to the above mentioned study, Valleé has shown DfMRI to detect a vascular process.

The fourth MedIm conference will be held in Trondheim in November 2012. The event is becoming the number one meeting place for PhD candidates in the field of Medical Imaging. 

 MedIm: www.medicalimaging.no

Written by Erik Ingebrigtsen for Nansen Neuroscience Network  

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