Peter Gatehouse

Biography

I began in cardiac MRI around 1990 when it had an almost comically random quality if it hadn’t been so serious for some patients. It’s improved a great deal since. I can’t honestly say that had anything to do with me. A strength of the Royal Brompton Hospital cardiac MRI centre is that it does only cardiac MRI, whereas many centres try a few cardiac scans a week and become disillusioned. The leadership of Professor Longmore who established this centre was inspiring. Another strength was essential in the earlier days: we modified the MRI scanners to improve their speed and flexibility for cardiac uses. This led to a dedicated cardiac MRI lab built in an old double-decker coach (avoiding planning permission for a new building). The physics of MRI is amazingly flexible if the electronics and software of the scanner is sufficiently open to modifications. On modern MRI systems we re-program how the images are acquired, to detect a range of different tissue properties. I remain most interested in the crazier forms of cardiac MRI (echo-planar imaging (EPI), spirals, locally selective imaging, hyperpolarized imaging) even if most busy clinicians understandably have no time for them. Otherwise I work on myocardial perfusion (almost the only excuse to use EPI in the heart) and blood flow imaging (especially real-time flow imaging) where cardiac MRI has much to offer but still sometimes has a bad reputation

Research Interest

Cardiology, myocardium