MR-Physicist

PD, PhD

Starting 1986 at the Delft University of Technology, Johannes Slotboom (PhD) worked in the field of Magnetic Resonance Imaging and Spectroscopy ever since. Within the in vivo MR-field he worked on hardware related topics like eddy-current compensation, automatic B0-shimming, the development of adiabatic pulse sequences for localized in vivo MR-spectroscopy (1991), studying the effects of RF-pulses on J-coupled spin systems (1994) spectral quantification. He received his PhD in 1993. After his PhD he worked a year at Philips Medical Systems on a simulation program for selective RF-pulses and the integration of 2D-selective RF-pulses into the scanner software. 

From 1994-1999 he worked as a research fellow at the AMSM at the University Bern further focusing on spectral quantification applied to 1H-muscle MRS and localized MRS of the human heart, and MRS of X-nuclei (³¹P, ¹³C and ²³Na) including hetero-nuclear decoupling, with applications to the liver and muscle. He was the co-inventor of a method for the restoration of electro-physiological signals distorted by inductive effects of magnetic field gradient switching during the signal acquisition phase of MR-pulse sequences. Since 2002 he works as a researcher at the Institute for Diagnostics and Interventional Neuroradiology of the University Hospital Bern, Switzerland. His main focus is on the clinical application of MR-spectroscopy in neuroradiology. In this context he worked on a protocol for quantitative clinical routine neuro-MRS, and the  application of machine learning to automatic quality control of in vivo MRSI data. He also worked in the field of texture parameter analysis of MR-perfusion weighted imaging applied to glioma grading, and differentiation of multiple sclerosis lesions, and for the differential diagnosis of enhancing lesions in the brain. Finally he published a feasibility study in the field of localized hypothermia for the treatment of acute ischemic stroke.

He was involved in multiple Swiss National Foundation funded projects (as main, or co-applicant), as was involved in EU-funded projects in the past as invited researcher in the FAST project focusing on the development of dedicated plug-ins for clinical MRS within the software package jMRUI. He was co-applicant in the EU-funded TRANSACT project which was recently closed, and is co-investigator in the Horizon-2020 funded project INSPiRE-MED which will tentatively start in March 2019.

Publications