Magnetic Resonance Imaging is a relatively new, non-invasive, way of detecting biological changes that take place in the brain as a result of disease. NMR physicists are still inventing new ways to use the MRI instrument, to measure many different aspects of the biological changes.

The NMR physics group at the Institute of Neurology has 12 members, and is focused on developing quantitative methods to study Multiple Sclerosis and Epilepsy, under the general leadership of Professor Paul Tofts (tel: 020-7837-3611 ext 4301).  We collaborate with a large number of NMR physicists in other parts of UCL, principally the Departments of Medical Physics and Computer Science, the Functional Imaging Laboratory and the Institute of Child Health.

Interaction with clinical scientists is close; as soon as a new technique is ready, it is applied to study disease. In addition to natural history studies, drug trials enable the effectiveness of new drugs to be assessed. Drug discovery and drug development may be aided. The depth, range and quality of our research can be seen from our publications, which can be found by searching for Tofts PS or Barker GJ in on-line bibliographic databases   (e.g. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi ).

Specific topics of research interest include magnetisation transfer measurements of bound water, diffusion tensor imaging and tractography, measurement of capillary permeability and blood flow and volume using Gd-tracers, measurement of blood perfusion using arterial spin labelling, image histogram analysis, image segmentation and registration, and image texture analysis.

We have vacancies for PhD studentships and Post-Doctoral Research posts from time to time.

More details on NMR Unit physics. Neurophysics in the Institute of Neurology. Quantitative MRI of the brain.

Back to Institute of Neurology home page. NMR Research Unit .

Updated September 26th 2005; maintained by Paul Tofts