Thomas W. Email & Phone Number

I thrive on solving problems and since I was a boy I loved doing that with computers. Naturally I decided to study computer science. Even before entering college I had decided that I wanted to combine my computer skills with medical imaging and oriented my education in that direction. After I landed my first job in a fMRI lab during my first year of college, MRI machines became literally everything to me. Some 15 years later, after completing my PhD at MIT, I became the head physicist at one of the best MRI research laboratories in the world, the Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging at the Massachusetts General Hospital. I get to solve problems that are meaningful to me and to take care of a family of 8 human MRI machines. This involves besides QA, technical diagnosis of problems and pulse sequence developments also the support of several hundred users of the center. My computer science side has not retired, so sometimes I find myself debugging Linux kernels, chasing down BIOS bugs, programming FPGAs or even soldering custom equipment I developed.My current work interests are in two areas. One is the optimization of clinical MRI procedures and to translate new MRI techniques into the clinic faster, which will ultimately allow for better diagnostic quality as well as increased patient comfort. What will the MRI machine of the future be like? In many aspects todays MRI machines are still confined by the basic principles set over 30 years ago. With modern computers and appropriate generalized algorithms many of these principles are no longer valid and the hardware can now be rethought. Time for me to get a bigger garage…. Specialties: MRI physics, MRI hardware debugging, Echo Planar Imaging, Pulse Sequence Programming, MRI QA, Rapid imaging, C++, Linux

Listed skills include Mri, Matlab, Medical Imaging, Biomedical Engineering, and 21 others.