R4N Lunch & Learn Webinar - Pump Prime Series with Professor Jo Hajnal

Title
Immersive Virtual Reality for MRI scanning of awake young children with neurodevelopmental conditions

Format

Professor Jo Hajnal will briefly outline the project which RESPECT 4 neurodivelopment funded, the project’s progress, how they engaged people with lived experience, key outcomes so far, and the directions this has opened for future work.

Project overview
This project aims to develop state-of-the-art neurotechnology to transform the experience of Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) for children with neurodevelopmental conditions (NDC). This is crucial, because although MRI is frequently used in the clinical management and neuroscientific investigation of NDC, the scan itself is often intolerable for the children because it is claustrophobic and noisy and requires keeping still for long periods of time. We have recently developed a virtual reality (VR) system for children having MRI2. A key aspiration is that children can have positive MRI experiences, which they control and that their experiential inputs should be customised to their needs. We achieve this through a dedicated display system that completely immerses the child in an interesting visual scene that they control simply using their eyes gaze. When combined with state-of-the-art motion tolerate imaging methods, high quality brain images can be acquired from awake children.

Bio

Jo Hajnal obtained a PhD in Physics in 1984, and following work on electromagnetism and molecular beam optics, started research in the domain of MRI in 1990. From 1997 to 2002 he led an industrial research team embedded in Hammersmith Hospital, before he was appointed as Professor of Imaging by Imperial College. He has held many senior roles in university and the MRC Clinical Sciences Centre. He joined King’s College London in 2012 as Professor of Imaging Science and now leads a wide ranging research program focusing on Imaging technology, particularly MRI and US, and image acquisition-reconstruction-analysis methods. Areas of special interest are imaging in the presence of motion, particularly neonates and fetuses, parallel imaging (transmit and receive) and accelerated/quantitative imaging. He leads the new 7T for London ultra-high field in vivo imaging initiative, funded by the Welcome Trust, and also the developing Human Connectome Project data acquisition and the iFIND project.