Dr Matt Hall - Adventures in subdiffusion for muscle imaging
Upcoming webinar: Friday 26th June 6:00 am Brisbane. Register online
Adventures in subdiffusion for muscle imaging
Skeletal muscle has a microstructure which strongly suggests fractional approaches, and in particular that subdiffusion might be a fruitful place to look. This talk covers some recent work at UCL's Institute of Child Health which covers imaging and simulation for diffusion MRI in muscle. This talk will cover work we've done in mouse models and the accompanying simulation and theory. I'm also going to sketch out some current future directions and touch on some clinical translation efforts (but only tantalisingly...) including the challenges of detecting muscle diffusion in vivo and the associated processing of the images rapidly and efficiently (not using matlab).
Dr Matt Hall used to describe his career as Brownian, but now feels that anomalous might be a better description. He has a degree in Physics from the University of Sheffield, UK and a PhD in Mathematics from Imperial College London where he studied statistical mechanics applied to evolutionary ecology. He then spent two years working as a consultant in a City of London firm specialising in complexity science for business, where he developed logistics software for firms including the Danish postal service. He then discovered diffusion MRI, moving first to St George’s, University of London, and then UCL.
He spent some time developing Monte-Carlo simulation for diffusion MRI, and then went back to the City for a while, working at the Financial Services Authority – an experience which led him straight back to research. He moved back to UCL, firstly to CMIC and then to the UCL Great Ormond Street Institute of Child Health, where he worked on fractional approaches for diffusion in muscle tissue and Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy. His current incarnation is as a Principle Research Scientist at the UK’s National Physical Laboratory where he is developing MRI harmonisation and standardisation, including for clinical applications of fractional diffusion, advanced simulation-based methods and phantoms development.