Rate My Professor Oliver Gurney-Champion

Dr. Oliver J. Gurney-Champion serves as Associate Professor in the Department of Radiology and Nuclear Medicine at Amsterdam UMC, where he also holds the position of Principal Investigator in the Cancer Center Amsterdam (CCA) Imaging and Biomarkers group. He obtained his PhD from Amsterdam UMC in 2017 with a thesis on "MRI of pancreatic cancer for radiotherapy purposes," building on his dual Master's degrees in Physics (Life and Health track) and Astronomy and Astrophysics, both awarded in 2012. Following his doctoral studies, he pursued a postdoctoral fellowship at the Institute of Cancer Research, honing his expertise in deep learning applications for quantitative MRI. Since 2020, he has been at Amsterdam UMC, initially as Assistant Professor and advancing to Associate Professor, leading a team of technical and clinical researchers focused on advancing MRI technologies.

Gurney-Champion's research specializes in developing and refining quantitative MRI (qMRI) techniques to enable personalized cancer treatments by non-invasively assessing critical tumor properties such as perfusion, cell density, elastic properties, and oxygenation. His work integrates machine learning and physics-informed models, particularly in intravoxel incoherent motion (IVIM) and dynamic contrast-enhanced (DCE) MRI, and he has developed open-source software tools like IVIM-NET and DCE-NET. Notable publications include "Improved unsupervised physics-informed deep learning for intravoxel incoherent motion modeling and evaluation in pancreatic cancer patients" (Magnetic Resonance in Medicine, 2021), "Comparison of six fit algorithms for the intra-voxel incoherent motion model of diffusion-weighted magnetic resonance imaging data of pancreatic cancer patients" (PLoS ONE, 2018), "Quantitative imaging for radiotherapy purposes" (Radiotherapy and Oncology, 2020), and recent works on neural controlled differential equations for MRI parameter estimation (Medical Image Analysis, 2026). His contributions have earned him the prestigious VIDI grant in 2023 for self-supervised physics-informed deep learning in tumor imaging, the Best Paper Award at ESTRO Physics 2024, OSIPI DCE Challenge (2022), and multiple funding awards from KWF, CCA, Hanarth fonds, and NWO. With over 1,400 citations, Gurney-Champion significantly influences the fields of MRI physics, oncology imaging, and AI in medical imaging. He actively teaches BSc and MSc courses in physics, biomedical technology, medical informatics, and deep learning for medical imaging, and chairs workshops for the International Society for Magnetic Resonance in Medicine (ISMRM).