What They Always Tell Us by Martin Wilson

MRMH: I actually took an MRS class during my masters and thought the method was amazing because you can quantify so many metabolites across voxels. I think it’s really this combination of fundamental physics, signal processing, software development, and clinical applications that has kept me interested in spectroscopy for the last 15 years. That was quite good fun as well, because we were based more in a hospital environment, working with clinicians and discovering some of the barriers that prevent spectroscopy from being used clinically. I stayed with the same group to do a postdoc, and that’s when I got more involved with in vivo spectroscopy. We started work on a software project called TARQUIN the aim of the software was to fit the data with minimal user interaction. At that time, there was another PhD student called Greg Reynolds, and together we realized we wanted to automate the analysis of these high-resolution spectra, as they were still done manually at the time. The project I worked on involved studying tumor tissues and cancer cell lines at high field using high-resolution magic angle spinning, and that is how I got my introduction to MRS. At the time, there was an opportunity to do a PhD with a clinician, an oncologist named Andrew Pete who researches childhood brain tumors. So medical physics seemed like something worth exploring in order to satisfy those desires. Afterwards, though, I was craving to do something more applied, and something that would be immediately beneficial to people’s lives. Martin: My undergraduate degree was in physics, and I was mostly interested in the theoretical side because that seemed to be what I was better at.

MRMH: Tell us about your background and how your research interest shifted towards MRI and spectroscopy? To discuss this Q&A, please visit our Discourse forum. This paper was chosen as this month’s Reproducible Research pick because Martin shared R code making it possible to fully reproduce all the results reported in his paper. It describes an adaptive baseline fitting algorithm (ABfit) for performing baseline estimations in automated analyses of routine MR spectroscopy (MRS) measurements. His paper is entitled “Adaptive baseline fitting for 1H MR spectroscopy analysis”. This MRM Highlights Pick interview is with Martin Wilson, a researcher at the Centre for Human Brain Health and School of Psychology at the University of Birmingham, UK.

SMRT-ARRT Professional Development Grant.

Koveleski Award for Professional Development

Past Annual Meeting Proceedings & Syllabi.

What They Always Tell Us by Martin Wilson