Professor Pipe is an Electrical and Biomedical Engineer by training and works in clinical settings to design and develop diagnostic Magnetic Resonance Imaging. He recently joined UW as a Visiting Professor and the Director of High Value MRI in the department of Radiology, with affiliate appointments in Electrical and Computer Engineering and Medical Physics. He is a Fellow and Past President of the International Society for Magnetic Resonance in Medicine (ISMRM), the global society dedicated to research and innovation in clinical Magnetic Resonance. He also served as Chair of their 2012 annual meeting in Melbourne, six international workshops on data sampling and image reconstruction, and a joint international workshop with the Radiological Society of North America on High Value MRI.
Dr. Pipe's research focuses on designing MRI technology that has a real, positive impact on patient care, with a technical emphasis on signal processing. He is best known for his invention of PROPELLER, a method specifically designed to eliminate the blurring that results when patients move during an MRI scan. This technology is now available on nearly all commercial scanners and used in millions of MRI exams each year. He continues to help establish the underpinnings for many next-generation methods such as Spiral MRI with a goal of increasing efficiency and access. He is an advocate for combining technology design with “use design” to improve the value of MRI in a holistic sense, working to maximize impact on both global healthcare sustainability as well as individual patient outcomes, experience, and safety.