Associate Professor Wenchuan Wu is part of the Oxford Centre for Integrative Neuroimaging. We spoke to him ahead of his Departmental Seminar.
Tell us a little about yourself, and what attracted you to working at the University of Oxford?
I did my bachelor’s and master’s degrees in Beijing and then came to Oxford for a DPhil on ultra-high field diffusion MRI. Oxford was a natural fit as it’s home to one of the leading 7T MRI programmes in the world, and the FMRIB centre is a fantastic place to do neuroimaging. I’ve been here ever since, and a big part of what’s kept me is that as a methods person, I’m right next to the neuroscientists and clinicians who could use the tools I develop. This kind of environment is quite unique, and it makes translating new methods into real applications much easier.
How did you get to where you are today? Can you tell us more about your career path?
I studied electronic engineering as an undergraduate, but what really fascinated me was image signal processing. For my master's, I wanted to go further to not just process images but understand how to generate them. I was also drawn to healthcare technology, as it felt like the most meaningful way to use my skills. I was lucky to find a master's programme in MRI physics that brought those two interests together. Then I came to Oxford for my Dphil with Karla Miller, focusing on diffusion MRI. I stayed on as a postdoc working on post-mortem brain imaging before moving into more computational work on image acceleration and reconstruction, supported by a Royal Academy of Engineering fellowship. Looking back, I'm still on the same track I started as an master student, developing engineering methods for healthcare applications. That wouldn't have been possible without great mentors and collaborators who gave me the space to find my own direction.
Can you give us a brief overview of your research?
I develop new ways to acquire MRI data and transform it into images. MRI is an incredibly powerful tool for studying the brain, but it has practical limitations: scans can be slow, the images can contain errors, and the spatial detail is often not fine enough to see the structures we care about. My work aims to address them by pushing spatial resolution, speeding up acquisitions, and correcting artefacts so the images are as faithful as possible to the underlying anatomy. Most of my work has focused on diffusion MRI so far, but I'm also exploring where these techniques can benefit other MRI methods.
What is the aim/vision for your research?
Ultimately, I want the methods I develop to make a difference in two directions: I hope to enable neuroscience researchers to study brain connectivity and microstructure at a level of detail that current tools simply don't allow; I also want to make advanced MRI methods fast and robust enough that they can be used routinely.
What can we expect from your Departmental Seminar?
I'll be talking about our work to improve MRI methods, so we can measure brain connectivity and tissue microstructure at higher resolution and in shorter scan times.
What key question are you trying to answer in your Departmental Seminar?
How precise can diffusion MRI get, and how fast can we push it, and what does it take to get there?