E. Mark Haacke, PhD
Professor, Department of Radiology, Wayne State University, Detroit, Michigan, USA
Professor and Vice-Chairman, Department of Biomedical Engineering, Wayne State University, Detroit, Michigan, USA
Director of the Perinatal MR Imaging Research Program
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| E-Mail: nmrimaging@aol.com |
| Mailing Address: WSU MRI Core, 4201 St. Antoine, Detroit, MI 48201 |
| Phone: (313) 745-1395 Fax: (313) 745-9182 |
| Publications |
| CV |
Awards and Recognitions
Gold Medal Award, International Society of Magnetic Resonance in Medicine
Silver Medal Award, Society of Magnetic Resonance
Gold Medal Award, International Society of Neurovascular Disease
Research Accomplishments
Dr. E. Mark Haacke, PhD, is the Director of the MR Research Facility at Wayne State University, a Professor of Radiology and Biomedical Engineering at Wayne State University, a Professor of Radiology at Loma Linda University in California, and a Professor of Physics at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. Prof. Haacke was the president of the International Society for Magnetic Resonance in Medicine in 1994, and was awarded the 2004 Gold Medal of the International Society for Magnetic Resonance in Medicine in Kyoto, Japan. Throughout his 37 years of experience in MRI, he has trained many people in MRI (more than 100 students, post-doctoral fellows, engineers, clinical fellows and research fellows) many of whom have become senior faculty and run their own research laboratories.
Dr. Haacke is an original pioneer of the MR angiographic imaging, fast imaging and cardiovascular imaging, and has developed a powerful new method for imaging veins, micro-hemorrhaging and iron called Susceptibility Weighted Imaging (SWI). This work has been extended to quantifying iron content using the technology quantitative susceptibility mapping (QMS). He has focused on studying the role of magnetic field variations in the human body and applying the results to clinical translational research. This work with the development of SWI and QSM offers better diagnosis of neurovascular disease. SWI may in fact become an important biomarker not just for different forms of iron but in investigating the etiology of a number of key diseases such as aging, multiple sclerosis, stroke and trauma. SWI is becoming part of a standard neuroimaging protocol eventually to be run on all neuroimaging cases. Both SWI and QSM are now being used to study stroke, atherosclerosis, Parkinson’s disease and multiple sclerosis (to name a few). Recently, he has developed a new microvascular imaging approach that can visualize vessels as small as 50 microns in size to study the vascular structure of neurodegenerative diseases. Finally, he has create a new rapid, mult-contrast technique referred to as STAGE that can allow up to 15 pieces of information about brain tissue in just 5 minutes, a breakthrough for clinical imaging.
Prof. Haacke has been working on a number of key studies in the PRB related to imaging the fetus, the placenta and the mother’s vasculature. Using SWI and QSM, his group has shown how oxygen saturation changes over gestational age. His group has used STAGE to map the tissue properties in the fetal brain. One of the major interests of the MR imaging group is to image the oxygen saturation, vasculature and T2* characteristics of the placenta to be able to predict abnormal developments related to intra-uterine growth restriction (IUGR). This work has led to the ability to visualize the spiral arteries, chorionic vessels, the umbilical arteries and veins (and measure their flow) as well as map out changes in T2* purportedly related to changes in tissue oxygenation levels. They have shown that T2* changes in the late second trimester and early third trimester can be used to predict abnormal fetal weight outcomes. Although these results are preliminary, they are an exciting new direction that could have practical implications for monitoring the growth of the fetus in high risk cases using MRI. Perhaps the most exciting aspect of this work is for the potential to make the 3D MR angiograms of the mother, fetus and placenta as well as the T2* maps practically available for clinical use. With these tools it should be possible to better diagnose and predict placental and fetal outcomes in the future.