2018.01.23 - Lab receives $5000 NIH-NCATS CTSA Core Subsidy Award

We have just received a one-year CTSA Core Subsidy award for the project entitled: 

"Towards Deep Neural-Net Analysis of Clinical Cardiac MR Database" 

This award will help establish an initial 400-500 subject Cardiac MRI Database that consists of anonymized research MRI datasets that will allow our MRTD research team and collaborators to conduct emerging research studies that involve new analysis methods using Neural Networks.  

--MRTD-Keig

2018.01.07 - Opportunity Page Now Available

The Lab website (Version 0.1; pre-release) has added the Opportunities page here for both prospective and current BME students at IIT. 

There is also a brief description of potentially 1-2 postdocs, as well as research rotation available in MRTD during 2018.

--MRTD-Keig

2017.12.21 - A new beginning next year

The old MRTD Lab at the University of Chicago Medical Center (UCMC) is moving to the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT)!

On January 1, 2018, the MRTD laboratory will complete its affiliation move from the UCMC to IIT’s Biomedical Engineering Department. As a BME laboratory that focuses in novel biomedical instrumentation on the MRI system, MRTD is transitioning its primary mission from its multi-Principal-Investigator clinical sciences support at the University of Chicago, to the development of human capita of the next generations of biomedical engineers at IIT who will serve key societal roles in bridging engineering and medicine.

Accordingly, the MRTD lab - while preserving its acronym - will be re-branded as the Magnetic Resonance Technology Discovery Lab upon its inception at IIT. 

Brief Timeline of the MRTD Laboratory (2014-2017) at UCMC

Following a ten-month period (Jan – Oct 2014) during which an engineering research infrastructure for MR technology development research was established in the Department of Medicine at UCMC; the MRTD, or Magnetic Resonance Technology Development Lab, was formally conceived in October of 2014 as an independent research entity with a $40,000 pilot research award from the Institute of Translational Medicine.

MRTD was one of the first staff-scientist led research laboratories within the University of Chicago (UofC)'s Biological Sciences Division, which followed the non-traditional laboratory model in “accomplishing large, creative and ambitious projects, including inventing the means to do so.” (From Article: Biology needs more staff scientists. Steven Hyman. Published in Nature, 16 May 2017). MRTD first served as a technical research wing of the Cardiac MRI program in the Cardiac Imaging Center at UofC, and gained grounds into key collaborations with UofC’s Neuro MRI program as its foundational engineering research infrastructure became an essential component for investigators who need new technology development on the MRI at the UCMC. 

There are a few notable contributions from the MRTD lab outside of the regular research space; these include: a) becoming one of the first Globus users for providing publicly available data, and b) successful participation in the innovation corps (i-Corps) program as MRTD, and c) establishing key industry collaborations towards building novel MRI systems technologies.

--MRTD-Keig