Ekin Karasan
UC Berkeley
ekin_karasan@berkeley.edu
Bio
Ekin Karasan is a Postdoctoral Researcher at UC Berkeley, working with Professor Michael Lustig. She earned her PhD from UC Berkeley in 2024 and her B.S. from MIT in 2018. Her research focuses on developing innovative acquisition techniques and flexible hardware for Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI). Ekin has been recognized with the Senior Academic Award from MIT in 2018 and the Berkeley Fellowship from 2018 to 2020.
Areas of Research
- Bioelectrical Engineering
Venous Perfusion Source Mapping
The cerebral venous system is pivotal in various neurological and vascular conditions, as well as in regulating blood flow during functional activation. However, the hemodynamics of the venous system are relatively unexplored compared to the arterial system due to their complexity and variability across individuals. To address this issue, we developed a novel venous perfusion source mapping method using MRI, which requires no exogenous contrast agent and instead uses blood water as an endogenous contrast agent. This technique uses Fourier encoding to resolve the sources of blood water entering an imaging slice over short (10ms) to long (3s) evolution times, effectively capturing venous perfusion sources in reverse. In this work, I first introduce and demonstrate perfusion source mapping in the superior cerebral veins. Next, I establish its sensitivity to global perfusion modulation with a caffeine study and its specificity by showing consistent and repeatable local perfusion modulation due to neural activation.