Magnetic resonance imaging pioneer honoured

UniQuest has congratulated The University of Queensland’s (UQ) Professor Stuart Crozier on receiving a 2012 Academy of Technology and Engineering Sciences (ATSE) Clunies Ross Award for his 20-year commitment to the field of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). The ATSE Clunies Ross Awards recognise outstanding achievement in the application of science and technology for the benefit of the wider community.

Professor Stuart Crozier.

“We are delighted to see Professor Crozier receive this well-deserved, prestigious and peer recognition,” said David Henderson, UniQuest’s Managing Director.

“Professor Crozier’s collaborations with industry, clinicians and patients have paved the way for engineering research fields to have a significant impact on health care. In this sense, he has pioneered not only the technology but also the relationships that support efforts to improve patient outcomes.

“We have been working with Professor Crozier and his colleagues for more than a decade. His research has helped to improve the functionality and effectiveness of high field magnet technology, and now two-thirds of the world’s clinical MRI machines utilise signal correction technology that he co-invented with Professor David Doddrell.”

This technology provides an enhanced and cost-effective capability for identifying subtle image features improving the quality of diagnosis at an earlier stage of disease and increasing the success rate of early medical intervention.

Professor Crozier was also instrumental in developing and commercialising a suite of patented magnet technology through Magnetica, a UniQuest portfolio company. Magnetica provides customised design and development solutions for superconducting high-performance magnets and magnet subsystems for MRI systems, developing highly customised MRI solutions for the healthcare industry.

An inventor on 24 patented MRI technologies, Professor Crozier has been behind Magnetica’s development of superconducting magnets for compact, portable MRI machines that can scan human limbs without having to immerse the whole body in the magnetic field.