Liz Tunnicliffe

I am a postdoctoral physicist interested in new ways of imaging the heart and liver using MRI, and in building simple physical models of tissue so that we can understand better what we see using MRI. 

My first main area of interest is cardiac diffusion imaging, using strong magnetic field gradients to label water molecules and then detect the way that they diffuse in and around the heart muscle. This means that we can detect the microstructure of the heart, with the aim that we will be able to better detect the problems with the heart muscle which can lead to arrhythmia. I work on the methods we use to acquire the data, as well as optimising how we analyse the data to ensure we have accurate data and are sensitive to disease.

I am also interested in tissue modelling, understanding how the different parts of organs (for example cells, blood, and extracellular fluid) contribute to make the signals we measure in MRI to produce images. This has been successfully applied in the liver to deal with the way microscopic iron deposits change some measurements we make to detect fibrosis and inflammation, which led to the set up of Perspectum Diagnostics, a spin-out company from the University.