Website: http://academic.mcgill.ca/newfac/profiles/2007/by-name/reader.htm

Coming to Canada from

University of Manchester, UK

Research involves

Improving the quality of brain images and enabling more precise, accurate measures of brain functioning.

Research relevance

Developing advanced brain imaging techniques will greatly aid research into brain disorders and their treatment.

Beauty is More Than Skin Deep

You often need to look beyond the surface of things to truly understand what is going on.

The human mind is no different; researchers must see inside the brain to understand how it works and how to properly treat diseases and disorders. Medical imaging techniques help reveal the brain’s inner workings, advancing knowledge about how it functions and aiding disease diagnosis and treatment.

As Canada Research Chair in Positron Emission Tomography, Dr. Andrew Reader is working to produce high quality images of the inside of the brain, enabling better understanding of brain functions. Reader’s methods are enhancing image definition and enabling more precise, accurate measures of brain functioning. Elegant structural details once difficult to see are becoming clear thanks to his image reconstruction and analysis work.

More specifically, Reader’s team is working to better model the physical steps that occur when medical images are taken, such as correcting or exploiting effects from patient movement. This will improve image quality.

Reader also wants to customize data processing so it better reflects exactly what an imaging study wants to know. For example, when blood flow is being measured, his team aims to estimate flow images directly from the raw data, instead of acquiring data and reconstructing images before conducting analysis.

His research will significantly help those who study how the brain works and strive to combat brain disease and disorders by producing clearer, higher definition images and more accurate, precise measurements.