Specific role:

The new Clinical Imaging Sciences Centre at BSMS will use MRI CT and PET imaging. The MR physics research will both develop new techniques and guide the use of existing ones by the clinical researchers. The novel MR physics techniques are the key to making progress in being able to visualise and measure the changes that take place in brain, spinal cord and optic nerve tissue. In the past, this could only be guessed, or seen in post mortem tissues. Now we can see these directly. By using a variety of physics techniques, we can access different aspects of the tissue changes that are taking place.  

Achievements in research:

I have been developing new MR physics techniques for most of my research career. I was the first to measure the concentration of brain chemicals (‘metabolites’) in live tissue (using MR spectroscopy). When the contrast agent Gadolinium DTPA became available, for use in detecting blood-brain barrier breakdown, I was the first to use this to measure how permeable the blood vessels had become, in a quantitative way. More recently I have worked on many aspects of quantification, including diffusion (which increases where tissue breaks down), and magnetisation transfer (which enables us to see demyelination).

I edited and part wrote a book ‘Quantitative MRI of the brain: measuring changes caused by disease’ which summarises all the techniques available. This is a very technical (and expensive) book, which won the Radiology Prize in the British Medical Association 2004 book competition. As a result of its success, it has been reprinted in paperback. To quote from the introduction:
The Multiple Sclerosis Society of Great Britain and Northern Ireland has supported the physics development in the Research Unit at the Institute of Neurology, Queen Square in a very generous way for many years, enabling a broad range of quantitative MRI techniques to be built up. Many of the contributors are associated with this group. Without the support of the Society, this book would not have been possible.

At the International Society for Magnetic Resonance in Medicine annual meeting in Miami in May 2006, I helped organise and give a new one-day course ‘Quantitative Image and data Analysis’ which was a great success. I have been asked to help with an enlarged 2-day version in 2006. 

Current research interests (both MS Society funded and other):

Quantification using MR physics. Applications in MS, brain tumours, and the retina. 

Why MS research?

After finishing my research training in physics many years ago, there were several career paths open to me. Many of my colleagues went into pure science. It was an idealistic time, and I felt that my talent should be used for the benefit of humans, not to find more fundamental subatomic particles. So I was attracted to medical physics early on. After a few years on CT scanning, MRI appeared and I have been involved from the start. I studied the brains of newborn babies for 2 years, then came to Queen Square after the MS Society installed the first 0.3T scanner in 1984. 

What (in your opinion) does the future hold for MRI in MS research?

Our novel physics techniques will continue to become more reliable, and able to measure smaller and smaller changes. We will find out more about what biological (tissue) changes these MR changes correspond to. This will enable us to understand more about how MS evolves. When there are drugs to be tested these techniques will be used to measure whether the expected changes have been arrested or not. By using MR outcomes, a drug can be tested much more quickly, and with fewer people, than in the conventional large scale drug trial which uses clinical outcomes. Our novel techniques will gradually become accepted as routine on hospital MR scanners worldwide.