My job

I'm currently a medical physicist at National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery at Queen Square in London. My primary area of responsibility within the physics team is scientific computing: developing methods for neuroimaging data analysis, and providing the framework and tools for using them. I'm involved in several areas of clinical and research imaging, particularly using MRI for surgical guidance in our intra-operative imaging facility. I hold an honorary post in the Department of Brain Repair and Rehabilitation at UCL's Institute of Neurology.

Until July 2008, I was a post-doc research fellow at UCL's Centre for Medical Image Computing (CMIC), on an EPSRC grant looking at vascular imaging of moving and deforming tissues in the abdomen. I mainly worked for Dave Hawkes and David Atkinson on reconstruction algorithms for liver images acquired during free breathing.

Until May 2005, I was a full-time PhD student at the Institute of Cancer Research, working the Sutton incarnation of The Royal Marsden Hospital. In a single (albeit longish) sentence, I worked on finding ways to make magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) faster whilst minimizing our loss of image quality, so that we can look for quite short-lived physiological effects; and on ways of processing this data, so that we can identify tumors and measure their extent and structure. I was awarded my PhD in 2007.

Before that, I was doing an Physics (MPhys) degree at St Edmund Hall in Oxford. I worked on radioisotope imaging and X-ray dosimetry at Addenbrooke's hospital in Cambridge, and on functional MRI at the FMRIB laboratory in Oxford, while I was a student.

In practice, all this means I spend a lot of time programming; particularly on reconstruction and registration methods, and (especially in the last few years at NHNN) interacting with DICOM systems and geometric image data.

If you're an MRI person, you might be interested in some pulse sequence diagram macros I wrote in MetaPost.

Work-related contact info

I'm happy to be contacted about work things via my main email address; but my UCL email address is mark.white (at) ucl.ac.uk.