Presented by Professor Steven Sourbron, Department of Infection, Immunity and Cardiovascular Disease

Age, disease and treatments often affect multiple organs to a different degree, but such multi-organ effects are difficult to disentangle in humans. A biopsy can identify local tissue changes with high specificity, but its invasive nature limits the utility in clinical practice, drug development or discovery science. In recent years, Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) has become increasingly quantitative and sensitive to changes caused by fibrosis, inflammation and other hallmarks of disease and aging. This is opening up the exciting possibility of using MRI as a sort of whole-body virtual biopsy, opening up new insights in human multi-morbidity and multi-organ disease by characterising multiple organs simultaneously and repeatedly over time. This talk will illustrate these ideas through examples of clinical research in current areas of interest in Sheffield, such as diabetes, or chronic kidney and liver disease.