Contact information
Peter Koopmans
Sir Henry Wellcome Postdoctoral Fellow
I develop DTI methods with high spatial resolution. These would allow imaging of white matter fibres in difficult areas, for example where bundles are in close proximity of one another or when they enter grey matter.
One of the main difficulties of high-resolution imaging simply is time and if time is money, the currency of MRI experiments is SNR (signal-to-noise ratio). The better the SNR, the higher the quality of the data and the more reliable the result. SNR scales with the sampled volume and because high-resolution experiments aim to obtain signal from small pieces of tissue, SNR is reduced. This can be compensated by using longer measurement times thereby reducing the impact of noise. However, if we divide the brain up into smaller and smaller units, the absolute number of units to measure increases dramatically which means we already need more time to measure all of them.
My work focuses on tackling the SNR/time issue by developing accelerated acquisition methods that reduce scan times. I use FMRIB’s recently acquired 7 Tesla MRI scanner that is beneficial in two ways: the ultra-high magnetic field boosts the intrinsic SNR of experiments while it independently improves the performance of acceleration methods.
I am funded on a Sir Henry Wellcome postdoctoral fellowship to develop and apply my methods in the brain and spinal cord in the context of chronic pain and motor neuron disease (MND/ALS).
Recent publications
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Two-dimensional-NGC-SENSE-GRAPPA for fast, ghosting-robust reconstruction of in-plane and slice-accelerated blipped-CAIPI echo planar imaging.
Journal article
Koopmans PJ., (2017), Magn Reson Med, 77, 998 - 1009
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High-resolution diffusion MRI at 7T using a three-dimensional multi-slab acquisition.
Journal article
Wu W. et al, (2016), Neuroimage, 143, 1 - 14
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Reducing slab boundary artifacts in three-dimensional multislab diffusion MRI using nonlinear inversion for slab profile encoding (NPEN).
Journal article
Wu W. et al, (2016), Magn Reson Med, 76, 1183 - 1195
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Large dynamic range relative B1+ mapping.
Journal article
Padormo F. et al, (2016), Magn Reson Med, 76, 490 - 499
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The relationship between oscillatory EEG activity and the laminar-specific BOLD signal.
Journal article
Scheeringa R. et al, (2016), Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A, 113, 6761 - 6766