Susi Rauh, from the department of Biomedical Engineering and Physics at AMC, was in 2022 given an AMS financed 'Dare-to-Dream' grant for PhD candidates. The grant gave Susi the chance to visit the NMR Laboratory at the Institute of Myology in Paris for 3 months. During her PhD Susi focused on quantitative magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) in skeletal muscle. While she previously worked on muscle injuries, the aim of this research visit was to translate the techniques she'd developed during her PhD research to muscle diseases and obtain a deeper knowledge of neuromuscular diseases and quantitative MRI techniques.
During her stay in Paris, Susi worked in a great team that focusses on quantitative MRI in neuromuscular diseases. While there, she gained experience in working on the MRI data of a large longitudinal study of patients with limb girdle muscular dystrophy (LGMD). By analyzing the quantitative MRI data, i.e. the diffusion tensor imaging data of LGMD patients, she learned to tackle several challenges coming with neuromuscular disease: the fatty infiltration in LGMD leads to a very low signal in the diffusion MRI data, which requires different acquisition and post-processing steps as compared to athletes with muscle injuries or healthy controls. In addition, Susi also developed a better understanding of the complexity of neuromuscular diseases and of the importance to find non-invasive biomarkers for monitoring and assessing treatment approaches.
Overall, the research visit proved a unique opportunity and exceeded Susi's expectations and has reassured her to stay in academia and in muscle research. The research stay in Paris yielded a successful collaboration that resulted in two conference abstracts and will be continued in the future.
Susi Rauh is in the middle of the picture, with her colleagues from the NMR lab.