News

Humans spend an estimated two-thirds of their lives upright, sitting or standing. The open MRI team within the Precision Imaging Theme of the BRC investigates our anatomy and how our body functions when we are upright.

The team consists of Dr. Rashed Sobhan, Dr. Olivier Mougin, Dr. Paul Glover, and Professor Penny Gowland from the Sir Peter Mansfield Imaging Centre.

The team is contributing to a project led by Leo Cancer Care, which aims to develop upright breast radiotherapy, a new alternative to typical lying-down radiotherapy for breast tumours, which will lead to mobile, lower-cost, smaller and more sustainable radiotherapy facilities.

For this project, the team are scanning participants both upright and supine (using a specific radiotherapy bra made by experts from Sheffield Hallam University) to understand how upright radiation therapy can be safely planned for patients.

Research Fellow Dr Rashed Sobhan explained: “We are working to understand how the relative anatomy of the breasts, heart and lungs changes with body position to optimise upright radiotherapy planning.”

A winner of one of the poster prizes at the Nottingham BRC conference, Rashed has been leading on the logistics, recruitment, data acquisition and management of the Leo Cancer Care project, among multiple other research activities.

New paediatric orthopaedics collaboration

Through a BRC joint workshop between the Imaging and MSK themes, Rashed and Associate Professor Ben Marson of the BRC’s MSIR Theme started a new collaboration which secured a pump priming grant to optimise the design and acquisition for dynamic 3D images of the hip-joint using Open MRI.

Rashed explained: “The MSK-KIDS project is aiming to optimise the MR protocol for acquiring images of the hip joint from healthy children in load-bearing postures using our open MRI scanner. We have now secured additional support from the Higher Education Innovation Fund (HEIF) to further develop this work to characterise hip joint motion within pelvis."

In recent months, Dr Sobhan has also led a collaboration with the Ministry of Defence (MOD) and Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (dstl) on a project, and has worked with researchers studying lung function at the Sir Peter Mansfield Imaging Centre to understand lung behaviour and function under the effect of gravity and altered oxygen intake.

Meanwhile, Rashed’s winning poster from the last BRC conference - on the topic of Upright MR Defaecography - has been submitted for publication in Magnetic Resonance Materials in Physics, Biology and Medicine (commonly known as MAGMA).

Honolulu medical conference presentation

The abstract from the completed research has been accepted for the ISMRM (International Society for Magnetic Resonance in Medicine) 2025 Annual Meeting in Honolulu, USA, this May. Rashed is preparing to present the work along with five of his abstracts, which were accepted for ISMRM this year.

In terms of his own plans, Rashed mentioned: “By the end of this year, I will complete data acquisition and analysis for the four ongoing collaborative projects (Leo, DSTL, Lung-OE, and MSK-KIDS) and begin drafting manuscripts for submission to relevant journals.

“Completing these multidisciplinary projects with effective dissemination will substantially strengthen the reputation of the BRC Precision Imaging research facilities, particularly the research Open MRI scanner, and contribute to developing further research projects in collaboration with external stakeholders.”