One of the main goal of the NMR laboratory is to move from qualitative and semi-quantitative evaluation to truly quantitative imaging measurements.

 

Quantitative measurements are mandatory to ensure the clinical relevance of high-technology imaging procedures, particularly in follow-up studies. Detecting very early and pre-clinical signs of a bad prognosis or, on the contrary, of a positive response to treatment is indeed one of the major demands put on medical imaging. Non-invasiveness, robustness, reproducibility and sensitivity are essential criteria for the acquisition of quantitative data. Continued efforts in our group will be devoted to constant improvement of these factors. There is however a dramatic gap between the capacity of modern imaging scanners to generate a very large volume of data and the incapacity of current software to process these data with appropriate, objective and automatic analysis tools. Designing, developing, testing, validating and, most important, introducing such tools into the routine is an absolute necessity and a top priority in the laboratory. The fusion of images originated from multiple technical modalities will be an integral part of the efforts (NMR and PET, NMR and optical imaging). Collaborations with French expert groups in these fields have been initiated and will have to be extended and boosted, partly through interactions with the manufacturer and through new collaborations with foreign groups.