Hounsfield Memorial Lecture 2015: Magnetic Resonance Imaging: Visions of Life

Imperial Provost Professor James Stirling handing Professor Jurgen Hennig the Hounsfield medal.

Imperial staff and students welcomed chemist and medical physicist Professor Jürgen Hennig to Imperial for the annual Hounsfield Lecture.

The Hounsfield Memorial Lecture brings together medical imaging researchers at Imperial and beyond and allows an international leader in biomedical imaging to address the College imaging community.

The Hounsfield Lecture 2015 was given on Wednesday 4th November by Professor Juergen Hennig from the University Medical Center Freiburg.  Professor Hennig is a German chemist and medical physicist, internationally renowned for his work as one of the pioneers of Magnetic Resonance Imaging for clinical diagnostics. He is an alumnus of Imperial and also studied at the Universities of Stuttgart, Munich and Freiburg, where he currently works as Scientific Director of the Department of Diagnostic Radiology and Chairman of the Magnetic Resonance Development and Application Center. His awards include the Biosciences and Medicine Max Planck Research Award (2003), the highest scientific award of Taiwan - Tsung Ming Tu Award (2010), and an Einstein professorship from the Chinese Academy of Science (2011).

Professor Hennig giving the lecture

Professor Hennig talked about current innovations in Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), which has been around for more than 30 years, but is still undergoing rapid development. This progress is being driven by innovative technologies as well as new challenges and opportunities arising from new advancements in biomedical research.  The introduction of new technologies is expected to lead to incremental improvements in current approaches to MRI, as well as new applications.

Although MRI has come a long way since its early stages, it still has far to go.

Poster competition and workshops

The event also featured workshops in the afternoon and a medical imaging poster viewing event and competition.

Four interactive workshops were organised, including:

• Imaging for Global Health
• Big Data @ Small Scales
• Magnetic Resonance Imaging and Atrial Fibrillation Ablation Studies
• Patient-specific-computational-fluid-dynamics

The winning poster was:

High resolution 3D MRI reveals continuous adverse effects of systolic blood pressure on left ventricular structure

by Antonio de Marvao  from the MRC Clinical Sciences Centre. 

Winner Antonio de Marvao from the MRC Clinical Sciences Centre

The joint runners-up were:

Investigating the Causal Relationship Between Perturbed Shear Stress and Formation of Progressive Atherosclerotic Plaques and Thin Cap Fibroatheroma in Transgenic Hypercholesterolaemic Minipigs

by Nilesh Pareek

and

Tractography of the Prostatic Neurovascular Bundles: Technique and Interpretation

by Amish Lakhani

Photos from the event can be viewed on our Flickr pages here.