Comprehensive description of brain tissue's microstructure is crucial for studying the normal and diseased brain. In the talk I will present an in-vivo biophysical framework for increasing the specificity of quantitative MRI to distinct microstructural features of brain tissue, such as the lipid composition and the iron homeostasis. This non-invasive approach identifies lipidomic-related changes in the aging human brain, and allows to test different aging theories. This approach also reveals the disrupted iron homeostasis in brain tumors, and provides iron-related information inaccessible by conventional MRI approaches. Finally, I will propose a new MRI protocol, for implementing this qMRI approach at the sub-voxel level. By monitoring microstructural processes in living brains, we hope to gain a quantitative and specific description of brain tissue that until now was possible only post-mortem, and may further advance human brain research.
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