Department of Radiology - Medical Physics

Research Areas

The ultimate goal of our research is to probe cellular structure of living biological tissues (the so-called tissue microstructure) non-invasively using Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI). For us, the currently most promising probe of tissue microstructure is diffusion of water molecules in the complex cellular environment. Also informative are the signal relaxation and the frequency shift. Our work includes a big portion of theoretical development towards understanding how features of cellular structure and function are reflected in the MRI signal. Our research spans the range between physics-type experiments with artificial samples to real clinical measurements. MRI measurement techniques developed in our group are tailored in agreement with theory to provide tractable experimental data for detecting specific microstructural features.

We are organically united with the Postprocessing Group to respond to the challenge of the ill-posed inverse problem of finding relevant microstructural features of living tissues given measured data.

All clinically relevant methods are validated in collaboration with our clinical partners.