Welcome Christoffer Olsson
Christoffer Olsson has recently started as a postdoctoral fellow in medical imaging at the CBH School.
“It feels very good. I look forward to the new project and learning a lot of new stuff. It is a very nice environment.”
What will you work with?
“We will develop and work with a fairly new technology called magnetic resonance elastography, which basically means that you shake your head while lying inside a magnetic resonance imaging scanner. When you do that, different parts of the brain will shake differently depending on how stiff it is, based on the patterns of how much shaking you see, you can recreate the image of how rigid the brain is in different places and create a full elastography.
Why do you want to know that?
“In our case, we want to see if we can find a correlation between different diseases. In the original project, we will look at young people and see which of them will later develop anxiety syndrome. Are there patterns where some have a certain stiffness or softness in different parts of the brain, and will you be able to see that as a clear indicator that the person will later develop anxiety,” says Christoffer Olsson.
Diagnosis of Parkinson's disease
He will also be involved in another research project where magnetic resonance elastography is applied in the diagnosis of Parkinson's disease.
“There are different diseases that look similar to Parkinson's disease and how to medicate depends on the type. So it is important to identify the right variant and this kind of (elastography) map will be able to determine what type of disease it is.”
How did you get on this track?
“From the beginning, I was interested in brain stimulation. But then I read on and applied for this job and became more and more curious. I have always wanted to go deeper into the MRI part of neuroscience, so this was a great job!”
What did you do before?
“I wrote my dissertation in biological physics at Chalmers where I looked at Cryopreservation. We wanted to find the molecular mechanism for how to stabilize proteins and other biological molecules with cryo. Then I got a postdoc position at DTU down in Denmark where I was building computer models for brain stimulation.”
Text: Jon Lindhe