Karla Epperson Wins SMRT President's Award

MR Elastography (MRE) is a noninvasive method to identify variations in tissue stiffness by applying low frequency mechanical waves to soft tissue. This work investigated the use of memory foam and an air bulb to ensure head motion in a vertical direction, to avoid signal loss (purple) and maximize desired signal (blue).

January 2016

Congratulations to Karla Epperson, her Stanford co-authors Kevin Epperson, Kim Butts-Pauly, Han Lu, Max Wintermark and Anne Sawyer, and her collaborators from the Mayo Clinic at Rochester, MN, USA!  Karla has received the most prestigious award at this year’s SMRT (Section for Magnetic Resonance Radiographers and Technologists) Annual Meeting, the ‘President’s Award’ for her abstract “Reproducibility Technique to Successfully Implement Magnetic Resonance Elastography of the Brain in Routine Clinical Protocol”.

The President’s Award is given to the most highly reviewed of all the abstracts submitted to the SMRT annual meeting.

Karla Epperson is a MRI Research Technologist at the Lucas Center for Imaging located at Stanford University School of Medicine, Department of Radiology. She has over 25 years of experience in health care including MRI, Ultrasound, EEG, Polysomnography, and EKG, and provides advanced instruction and support to numerous researchers.  In 2014 she won the SMRT First Place Research Poster award entitled “Imaging the Thalamus Using a Novel White Matter Nulled Pulse Sequence: Does 7T Improve Image Quality over 3T?”.

Karla feels that the best part of her job is helping the patients and researchers, and witnessing the development of health care improvements as they are translated into clinical reality.