Markus Karlsson
Markus's PhD aimed to developed a non-invasive tool to characterize liver diseases using MRI. A summmary of the thesis Markus defended in 2019 can be found below.
There is a large and unmet need for diagnostic tool that can be used to characterize chronic liver diseases (CLD). In the earlier stages of CLD, much of the diagnostics involves performing biopsies, which are evaluated by a histopathologist for the presence of e.g. fat, iron, inflammation, and fibrosis. Performing biopsies, however, have two downsides: i) biopsies are invasive and carries a small but non-negligible risk for serious complications, ii) biopsies only represents a tiny portion of the liver and are thus prone to sampling error. Moreover, in the later stages of CLD, when the disease has progressed far enough, the ability of the liver to perform its basic function will be compromised. In this stage, there is a need for better methods for accurately measuring liver function. Additionally, measures of liver function can also be used when developing new drugs, as biomarkers for drug-induced liver injury (DILI), which is a serious drug-safety issue.
Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is a non-invasive medical imaging modality, which have shown much promise with regards to characterizing liver disease in all of the abovementioned aspects. The aim of this PhD project was to develop and validate MR-based methods that can be used to non-invasively characterize liver disease.
In summary, this thesis has shown that multimodal quantitative MR has a bright future for characterizing liver disease from a range of different aspects.
You can read Markus's thesis here.