Publications

(Papers and More!)

There has been much controversy in the field about the rate of pyruvate transport across the blood-brain-barrier within the lifetime of the hyperpolarised experiment. Through of the use of spectroscopy, imaging and the permeablisation of the blood-brain-barrier both physiologically and pathophysiologically, we show in this work that the role of the BBB cannot be neglected. This fortunately seems to be a function of the anaesthetic used, and provides a further impetus to study humans, rather than animals.
In Scientific Reports
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This work assesses variability in metabolic readings as determined by hyperpolarized magnetic resonance spectroscopy.
In NMR in Biomed.
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Ketone bodies are often maligned as the ‘forgotten’ metabolic fuel source. In this work, we show that labelled acetoacetate can be simply synthesised, hyperpolarised, injected with no discernable toxicity in vivo, and their subsequent metabolic kinetics observed
In NMR in Biomed.
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In this work we show that the role of the immune system in myocardial infaction can be measured using hyperpolarised Magnetic Resonance, and cannot be neglected. It is currently in press
In Circ. Res.
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This invited chapter in a reference text covers in 70 or so short pages the physical origins of Dynamic Nuclear Polarisation, and applications and strategies for its applications. Unfortunately, despite my best efforts, it is not open access. Please contact me directly for assistance.
In Protocols and Methodologies in Basic Science and Clinical Cardiac MRI
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In this work, we show that hyperpolarised fumarate enables the detection of cardiac necrosis directly following injury, which would be of significant clinical utility.
In JACC: CVI
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Ketone body metabolism is of considerable interest in humans, owing to the comparatively recent discovery of methods for creating ketotic states without starvation. This work shows that the consumption of exogenous ketone compounds achieves ketosis in humans, safely and effectively.
In Frontiers in Physiology
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Magnetic susceptibility causes a number of artefacts in some MR experiments, particularly Echo Planar Imaging. This work describes a reconstruction method to substantially ameliorate such artefacts, using a physics-based algorithm. The code and example datasets are available online.
In Magon. Res. Med.
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In Proc. Intl. Soc. Magon. Res. Med. 2017
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In Proc. Intl. Soc. Magon. Res. Med. 2017
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In Proc. Intl. Soc. Magon. Res. Med. 2017
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In Proc. Intl. Soc. Magon. Res. Med. 2017
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In Proc. Intl. Soc. Magon. Res. Med. 2017
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The role of the immune system following a myocardial infarction is complex and not completely understood. Here we use hyperpolarized magnetic resonance to investigate lactate production and glycolysis in the heart, and showed that 2-deoxyglucose alters the pattern of disease following infarction.
In The Lancet
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This work shows that the Cramér-Rao Lower Bound derived from spectral quantification algorithms is a sensible weight to chose for the propagation of uncertainty throughout the population.
In Magon. Res. Med.
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We show here that multiple-slice spectroscopy combined with hyperpolarized pyruvate forms a powerful tool of diabetic metabolism
In NMR in Biomedicine
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Here we show that the use of Padé approximants (rational polynomial approximating functions, in contrast with the linear polynomials more typically encountered) can be used to form an alternative reconstruction method for CSI data. This may be of utility in a hyperpolarized context.
In Tomography
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Here we show that Metformin has a profound effect on visible lactate production in the myocardium, which is consistent with a hypothesis that it changes the cellular redox state. This is a significant finding in the context of diabetes care, as diabetic cardiomyopathy is a common cause of death for diabetic patients.
In Diabetes
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Here, we investigated the effect of a first-line anti-diabetic drug, Metformin, on cardiac metabolism.
In Proc. Soc. Card. Magon. Res.
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One of a series of Lau, Miller and Tyler papers, here we show that hyperpolarized pyruvate can be used a probe of intracellular pH through the use of a spectrally-selective excitation pulse that excites CO2 and bicarbonate with a large flip angle.
In Magon. Res. Med.
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One of a series of Lau, Miller and Tyler papers, here we show that hyperpolarized pyruvate can be co-polarized with urea, and used as a combination perfusion/metabolism probe.
In Magon. Res. Med.
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In Proc. Intl. Soc. Magon. Res. Med. 2016
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One of a series of Lau, Miller and Tyler papers, here we show that hyperpolarized urea can be used as an effective quantitative probe of perfusion, and one that is potentially able to detected conditions such as balanced ischaemia that are traditionally not visible to first-pass perfusion imaging with gadolinium
In Magon. Res. Med.
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Here the authors demonstrate that cardiac energetics are changed in heart failure, a major cause of death in the western world.
In Cardiovasc. Res.
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This publication represents the first major piece of work from my PhD, a high resolution and robust imaging sequence that was able to image cardiac metabolism at (for the time) world-leading spatial resolution.
In Magon. Res. Med.
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In Proc. Intl. Soc. Magon. Res. Med. 2015
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In Proc. Intl. Soc. Magon. Res. Med. 2015
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In Proc. Intl. Soc. Magon. Res. Med. 2015
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In Proc. Intl. Soc. Magon. Res. Med. 2015
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In Proc. Intl. Soc. Magon. Res. Med. 2015
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In this publication, I wrote a $T_{2}^{*}$ mapping sequence and analysis pipeline to help quantify iron levels in mice with profoundly altered iron homeostasis through magnetic resonance. This was technically challenging owing to the high level of iron in some tissues within each individual, and various electrodynamic interactions that arose due to the relatively high field (7T) magnet used.
In Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci.
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Another paper mathematically modelling adult neurogenesis, in which we further investigate the previously proposed model.
In Comput. Methods. Biomech. Biomed. Engin.
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This work describes a set of PDEs to describe a neurological process in the adult brain, computationally solves them, and then performs a sensitivity analysis. I wrote most of it as a third year undergraduate student on a Nuffield Foundation sponsored placement. My supervisors were the first and last authors.
In J. Roy. Soc. Interface
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In my university we have hte ability to use IBM Spectrum Protect aka HFS Backup aka Tivoli Storage Manager for backing up large amounts of experimental data. Unfortunately, due to local rules this fails if the amount of data to be sent is more than 200 GiB and we have to email the central team and ask them to let us back it up again. The below script (just about) automatically stops the process if it’s going to bust a pre-determined size limit.

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A common problem in spectroscopy experiments is variable temperature control. One of the giant companies in the field, Bruker, has made a device that blows hot or cold air at samples to regulate their temperature. The device that blows air and runs the show has gone through several iterations over the years, but one variant is called the Bruker BVT3000 variable temperature controller. It has a little microcontroller, and talks to a commercially available (at the time) PID controller called the Eurotherm 902 series.

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su echo 1 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward #Enable NAT iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -o eth1 -j MASQUERADE #Set up DNAT iptables -A FORWARD -i eth1 -o tap0 -m state --state RELATED,ESTABLISHED,NEW -j ACCEPT #Enable connections from the private subnet S1 out iptables -A FORWARD -i tap0 -o eth1 -j ACCEPT #Enable connections from the tunnel to the the private subnet, i.e. from S2 to S1 #Bring up the tunnel: ifconfig tap0 up #Configure the tunnel as you like: ifconfig tap0 192.

CONTINUE READING

The NZ Plot The N-Z plot, also known as the Plot of the Nuclides, is a standard plot in which one shows $N$, the number of nucleons in an isotope, against $Z$, its proton number. For low $A=N+Z$, this is approximately a straight line along which stable nuclei exist. As an medical physicist, I perpetually find myself wishing to refer to the NZ plot occasionally, in order to find out if a given nuclide is either (a) NMR visible (that is, $I\neq0$), (b) radioactive with a decent activitiy, or occasionally both.

CONTINUE READING

The problem: You have an expensive piece of bespoke hardware box, $A$, on a private subnet $S_1$. Your computer of interest, $C$, is sat on a different subnet, $S_2$. There is a linux router between the two, $B$, running sshd. You wish $C$ (or a virtual machine thereon) to talk to $A$, but don’t want the rest of $S_1$ to be accessible to all of $S_2$ or vice-versa. In short, you want something on $C$ to use a specific (virtual) network interface to go $C\rightarrow B\rightarrow A$.

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Projects

VarianTools and other MRI utilities

Sources and utilities for common MR problems on the Varian/Agilent platform

DPhil Thesis

Online copies of my DPhil [PhD] thesis.

Teaching

I have taught the following courses:

Department of Physics

  • Year 1: Classical Mechanics, Special Relativity, Circuit Theory, Electromagnetism, Optics

  • Year 2: Electromagnetism, Quantum Mechanics

  • Year 3: Biophysics

Department of Biochemistry

  • Year 1: Mathematics, Statistics (Four very basic lectures on statistics can be found here: 1 2 3 4 )

The University of Oxford Doctoral Training Centres

Contact