Research

Biomedical Imaging Center

Magnetic Resonance Elastography (MRE)

Magnetic Resonance Elastography (MRE) is a non-invasive quantitative imaging technique that measures the viscoelastic tissue stiffness. Development of MRE at the Beckman Institue focuses on characterizing tissue across healthy populations and from changes due to neurodegenerative diseases. At Carle Foundation Hospital, MRE is being applied to clinical populations where it may be able to improve diagnosis towards improved patient outcomes.

Collaborators

University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

• Bradley P. Sutton, PhD – Bioengineering - Beckman Institute
• Zhi-Pei Liang, PhD – Electrical & Computer Engineering - Beckman Institute
• Fan Lam, PhD – Bioengineering - Beckman Institute
• Ryan Dilger, PhD – Animal Sciences
• Callan Luetkemeyer, PhD – Mechanical Science & Engineering
• Kari Foss, PhD – College of Veterinary Medicine

Carle Health

• Graham R. Huesmann, MD, PhD – Carle Neuroscience Institute - Epilepsy Center - Carle Illinois College of Medicine
• Fadi Mikhail, MD – Carle Neuroscience Institute - Epilepsy Center - Carle Illinois College of Medicine
• Wael H. Mostafa, MD, PhD – Carle Neuroscience Institute - Carle Illinois College of Medicine
• Jerrad Zimmerman, MD – Carle Orthopedics and Sports Medicine - Carle Illinois College of Medicine
• Claudius Conrad, MD, PhD – Carle Cancer Institute - Carle Illinois College of Medicine
• Bruce Damon, PhD – Stephens Family Clinical Research Institute - Carle Illinois Advanced Imaging Center

Selected Recent Publications

A curated selection of recent and representative publications. For a complete list see my ORCiD or Google Scholar.

• “Simultaneous Acquisition of Magnetic Resonance Elastography (MRE) and Diffusion Tensor Imaging (DTI) Optimized for Human Brain”, Magnetic Resonance in Medicine (2026). DOI: https://doi.org/10.1002/mrm.70396
• “High-Resolution Brain Metabolic Imaging at Ultrahigh Field Using Extended Spatiospectral Encoding and Subspace Modeling”, IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering (2025). DOI: https://doi.org/10.1109/TBME.2025.3572448
• “MR Spatiospectral Reconstruction Integrating Subspace Modeling and Self-Supervised Spatiotemporal Denoising”, IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging (2025). DOI: https://doi.org/10.1109/TMI.2025.3555928
• “ANTs, BET, or…neither? An exploration of brain masking and machine learning tools applied to magnetic resonance elastography”, Proceedings EMBS (2024). DOI: https://doi.org/10.1109/EMBC53108.2024.10781675
• “MaPPeRTrac: A Massively Parallel, Portable, and Reproducible Tractography Pipeline”, Neuroinformatics (2024). DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12021-024-09650-0