Maria I Altbach

Dr. Altbach is Professor in the Departments of Medical Imaging and Biomedical Engineering. Dr. Altbach has over 20 years of experience directing a lab that develops novel MRI technology for quantitative MRI. Her research focuses on the development of new quantitative biomarkers to assess early stages or risk of disease as well as to predict response to treatment with the goal of translating the novel technology to the clinic. To adhere to the time constraints of clinical MRI examinations, her work is based on the design of acquisition and reconstruction techniques that yield images and quantitative maps from significantly less data than conventional methods, thus improving imaging efficiency and patient comfort. Her team of basic scientists, engineers and clinicians work together with industry to optimize the novel techniques for human imaging. Dr. Altbach's work has been funded by the National Institutes of Health, the American Heart Association, the Arizona Biomedical Research Center and industry and technology developed in her lab is distributed worldwide. Current disease areas being investigated with the quantitative MRI technology developed in Dr. Altbach's lab are the detection and characterization of small abdominal lesions, deemed too-small-to-diagnose with current imaging modalities; early staging of non-alcoholic fatty liver disease to prevent progression to liver cancer; and the characterization of the arterial wall in carotid artery disease to predict stroke.