Profile

When I’m not working on my PhD I like gaming, reading and spending time with my friends and family. I moved to Glasgow a few months before the lockdowns started so it took a while to get the full measure of the city, but very much enjoying it now. I’m a vegetarian and have been my whole life, and a cat person, although one that’s currently lacking cats.

I had a bit of a weird route into science (I did an English degree first and did a Radiotheraphy Physics degree after), and I’ve been very lucky to be able to pursue all my interests! If anybody has any doubts about whether they want to go into science or something else I’m more than happy to share my experiences with you; I can’t tell anyone what to do but I’m very much the kind of person who wants to do everything and appreciate how hard it can be to choose sometimes.

We use imaging of radioactive substances attached to things like sugar (specifically glucose) and fatty acids (specifically acetate) injected into the body to track how tumours grow, how they differ and how these differences might affect a tumours response to radiotherapy.

The imaging I do is a type of nuclear imaging called ‘Position Emission Tomography’. Nuclear imaging is a type of imaging that uses radioactive substances to track not only the physical anatomy of the body but also its function. If we image continuously over time, we can see how the radioactively labelled material (known as a ‘tracer’) progresses through the body. This can tell us a lot about the metabolism of tumours, and we can look at how different tumours with different metabolisms respond to radiation to try and work out if anything on our images is correlated with a better or worse response to treatment. I’ve included an explanation of how PET/MRI works below for anyone interested.

Explanation of PET/MRI: You may not have heard of a positron, but it’s more than likely that you’ve heard the term ‘electron’, which is a tiny piece of negatively charged matter that is part of what makes up an atom (which is why it’s called a subatomic particle). A positron is the positively charged version of this. It’s common to think of the proton as the ‘opposite’ of an electron, but in fact a proton is much heavier than an electron (about 1835 times heavier!) while a positron is the same mass. When a positron and electron collide, energy is released in the form of two gamma rays of a specific energy that travel in opposite directions. A gamma ray is identical to the X-rays used in hospitals to image broken bones, except a gamma ray originates in the nucleus while an X-ray does not. If we set up panels around the person being imaged we can record when these gamma rays hit, and can feed this into a computer that works out exactly where the collision happened. On its own, this produces an image that looks like different intensities of light. To work out where in the body this collision is, we do a different type of imaging at the same time called Magnetic Resonance Imaging.

Magnetic Resonance Imaging involves applying a magnetic field which causes the hydrogen nuclei in the body to align, and then using radiowaves to cause these particles to produce a signal that our imaging machine can pick up and that our software can analyse to produce images of the body. The reason we use hydrogen nuclei is because soft tissue in the body has a lot of water, and this water has hydrogen nuclei (think of the formula for water, ‘H2O’- this means there are two hydrogen nuclei in every molecule of water.)

Combining the two gives us an image that tells us where in the body the tumour is (from the MRI) and how much of the substances we’ve injected the tumour has taken up (from the PET).

The main machine I use for imaging is a PET/MRI (Positron Emission Tomography/Magnetic Resonance Imaging). Put briefly, the ‘PET’ part of the imaging tells us what the body is doing, and the MRI tells us what the body looks like and where everything is. I’ve included a more in depth explanation in the ‘my work’ section. A typical day involves injecting the tracer, waiting a bit for the tumour to take up enough of the tracer and then doing the imaging. On the PET image, the lighter parts generally represent a part of the body that has taken up a lot of the tracer, and by overlaying this onto the MRI we can see whether these high uptake areas are in the tumour.