Senior researcher Henrik Lundell, engineer and PhD at DRCMR, Hvidovre Hospital, has over the last years worked hard to push the boundaries for precision imaging with MRI. His work has now been acknowledged with the prestigious “Starting Grant” from the European Research Council (ERC). The award comes with 1.5 million €  to support his project called C-MORPH. Within the project, which will run for five years, Henrik will hire three postdocs and one PhD-student.

Conventional MRI has a limited image resolution and cannot image structures smaller than about 1 mm in size. However, many aspects of the function of the brain in health and disease are determined by the structure and configuration of cells that are smaller than one tenth of the thickness of a hair. Henrik’s approach to this problem has been to create hybrids of multiple techniques to tease out the geometry of specific cell types, information previously only available through tissue destructive microscopy. The project name C-MORPH stands for Cell-specific in vivo MORPHOmetry (C-MORPH) and aims for creating maps of the structure of the individual cell types that make up the brain.

This work is made possible by the state of the equipment available at DRCMR. In particular the two new ultra high-field 7 tesla scanners at the department will be crucial.  One smaller is used for samples and animals for method development and the larger one, which is part of a national initiative, is used for humans.

This unique infrastructure and Henrik’s fresh approach to medical imaging will enable the development of MR based methods and analyses to derive cell-type specific tissue properties in the healthy and diseased brain and validate them with the help of a strong translational experimental framework, including histological validation.

You can read more about the ERC starting grants 2018 here.

If you want to read more (in Danish) about the other Danish recipients, click here.