Chapter 1 Preface

Welcome to Mengfei's NeuroBook.

I am Mengfei Cai and obtained my PhD degree from Radboud University Medical Center (Radboudumc) on 19th April, 2022, supervised by Prof. FrankErik de Leeuw, Prof. Marco Duering, and Dr. Anil Man Tuladhar.

My Doctorate dissertation was entitled “Temporal dynamics of cerebral small vessel disease: A motor perspective”, with the aim to investigate how cerebral small vessel disease is involved into the motor functioning based on the well-known RUN DMC prospective cohort study.

Temporal dynamics of cerebral small vessel disease: A motor perspective

PhD thesis cover

Specifically, we applied neuroimaging techniques to extract the structural/diffusion information from MRI scans in an effort to leverage these information to gain a better understanding of SVD.

MRI has emerged as an increasingly popular and powerful way to study in vivo brain structure and function, in both healthy and pathological individuals.

As mentioned by Mark Jenkison, the Father of FSL, at Oxford University:

“Although MR operators, radiologists, annd technicians are often available to help with data collection, running the scanner, and choosing good squences and settings, when it comes to analysis, researchers are often on their own.”

Based on my original enthusiasm on Neuroimaging and encouragement/guidance from co-promoter Marco Duering, Marco’s words somehow further inspired me to expand my knowledge and hone my skills with respect to neuroimaging analyses.

Since I always hold the belief that “word is world”—— the limit of our language is the limit of our world, which means that keeping a good journal of “words’ could greatly help organize your thoughts, ideas.

Hereby, it would be a great chance to tease out what I have learnt, commonly used from my research practice. The summarized neuroimaging suggestions, scripts, usage of coding might not only help me to accelerate workflow, but also assist peer colleagues to obtain a general overview of neuroimaging approaches.

I will keep updating this Mengfei's NeuroBook as long as I stay in the neurology research world.

For those who are interested in neuroimaging techniques and have some suggestions, questions on this NeuroBook, you are more than welcome to reach me via email: cmfdream@foxmail.com.