Paul Summers

I bring MRI techniques to clinical applications and neuroscience research. My doctoral work (Guy’s Hospital, London), centered on blood flow measurement in carotid disease and pediatric cardiology but was simultaneously involved in collaborations that ranged from surgical planning, image registration and MR motion correction, an early interferon-beta MS drug trial, performing Europe’s first simultaneous MR-PET scan, and some of the first MR autopsy scans. Moving to King’s College Hospital I worked on diffusion tensor imaging in neurological disorders, and entered neuro-interventional radiology, which persisted in my subsequent posts in Zurich and Oxford, where I generated angiographic images for clinical use, and supported simulations of flow in aneurysms and AVMs with quantitative flow measurements. In Zurich, I also trained doctoral students in the use of fMRI and simultaneous EEG-fMRI for movement, pain and learning studies, and started applying DWI to the spinal cord. Some years working with little success on spinal cord MRI in Modena Italy, was compensated by being able to bring prostate and whole-body MRI to large scale use (from 0 to over 1000 cases per year each) in an oncology center (IEO) in Milan. During this time, I also worked on characterization of Parkinsonian changes to the substantia nigra using CEST techniques, a multi-center epilepsy study and dabbled in millimeter waves. As Director of MRI at SFU’s ImageTechLab, I hope to foster a varied network of collaborations in SFU, SMH and the wider BC community, while growing my interests in reproducibility and electromagnetic characterization.