Thomas Okell DPhil MSci

Professor Thomas Okell is an Associate Professor based at the Podium Institute within the Institute of Biomedical Engineering and a Fellow of St Catherine’s College, with a joint appointment at the Nuffield Department of Clinical Neurosciences. His role focusses on the use of advanced neuroimaging methods to explore relationships between sports, injuries, mental health and cognition. He obtained his doctoral degree in Oxford developing novel non-invasive MRI-based methods for studying brain blood flow. He has since secured fellowships from the Royal Academy of Engineering and the Wellcome Trust/Royal Society to develop advanced methods for non-invasive blood vessel (angiography), perfusion and structural imaging, including acquisition, image reconstruction and physiological modelling. He has applied these approaches in various cerebrovascular disease and neuroscience studies.

• Novel MRI image acquisition methods for cerebrovascular and structural imaging
• Motion correction
• Low-rank and deep learning-based image reconstruction
• Physiological modelling for quantitative imaging
• Large-scale (population) imaging
• The application of these approaches to study pain, cognitive function and mental health in those with sports-related injuries, including mild traumatic brain injury, and cerebrovascular diseases

• The development of robust ultra-high field (7T) angiography and perfusion imaging techniques
• Analysing large-scale perfusion imaging datasets and links to various lifestyle, physiological, genetic and disease factors
• Improving the robustness and spatial resolution of perfusion imaging methods through developing novel acquisition strategies, motion-correction approaches and sophisticated image reconstruction algorithms
• Few-shot deep learning image reconstruction for accelerated cerebrovascular imaging
• Simultaneous acquisition of angiographic, perfusion and structural images for rapid assessment of cerebrovascular health
• Identifying novel imaging markers of pain and mental health conditions
• Novel approaches to study disease mechanisms in mild traumatic brain injury, including assessment of the blood-brain barrier