Chris Trimble and Kaia Sorland, PhD candidates at Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) recently spent three weeks at CAI, in the Cloos group.
Chris and Kaia are working with Magnetic Resonance Fingerprinting (MRF), a novel advancement in medical imaging technology. Their wider project hopes to develop MRF to improve prostate cancer diagnosis. The aim of their visit to CAI was to improve the MRF pulse sequence and data post-processing to mitigate strong streaking artefacts from the femoral arteries and veins.
The students met Martijn at ISMRM in London and agreed that a research stay at UQ would be the best way to move forward with their projects. Their main supervisor, Tone Frost Bathen, found Martijn through Siemens as the main developer of a MR Fingerprinting sequence that could be implemented on the MRI system at St. Olavs hospital, the Trondheim University Hospital. Tone contacted Martijn to join the project, where the target was to further develop the sequence for prostate imaging. “Luckily he replied yes, and then it was natural that he also joined as co-supervisor when the project was granted funding at NTNU”.
Both of the students live in Trondheim. Neither had been to Australia before. Chris and Kaia said they found everyone to be extremely friendly and polite, and enjoyed the Australian way of life during their stay. They visited some of the beauty spots near the city including Springbrook National Park and Noosa Heads, after being recommended these places by Viktor. Chris said he had long wished to visit this country and enjoyed seeing the Southern Cross most nights.
“We certainly would have liked to have stayed longer and seen more of the beautiful country. Being from Norway we took the chance to swim in such warm waters. The weather in your winter was even better than our summer. Granted if we had visited in January, we might have expired,” commented Kaia and Chris. The students said they were very grateful to all involved in their visit to UQ, especially Martijn for his insights, support and expertise. The visit had been an invaluable experience and helped progress both our projects to a great extent, and if the opportunity arose would certainly come again.
Chris and Kaia: “There is too much to single out a favourite moment, but our main takeaways were the amazing landscapes and animals (including bush turkeys and bin chickens) but also the friendly and positive people of Australia, the fantastic UQ campus and all the exciting research happening at CAI.”
