Björn Wieslander

The core focus of my research is on developing and improving the use of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) in charaterizing lung disease and its cardiovascular causes and consequences. I am particularly interested in the interplay between the lungs and the heart as disease in one organ often affects the other by altering hemodynamic conditions, i.e. the pressure and flow of the blood as it passes through both organs. I find pulmonary and cardiovascular MRI to be a very exciting field to be a part of an contribute because the technological development is rapid. MRI is a very versatile tool when it comes assessing pulmonary and cardiac disease as it is suited to both assessing the properties of soft tissue as well as measuring flow in three dimensions over time.

I am also a resident physician (ST-läkare) in clinical physiology, a specialty in which a number of other methods are used to examine the heart and lungs including electrocardiography (ECG), echocardiography among others. Beyond MRI, I frequently conduct of collaborate in research involving those methods as well whenever they are appropriate to provide answers to clinical problems I encounter in my everyday work. 

My background in brief: I studied medicine until 2014, during which time I became involved with Karolinska Institutet’s cardiac MRI research group. I defended my PhD thesis in 2016 with comparison between ECG and MRI. Alongside my clinical research internship (Forskar-AT), I conducted postdoctoral research at Karolinska Institutet studing pulmonary hypertension using MRI. I then spent almost two years during 2020–2022 conducting postdoctoral research as a research fellow at the US National Institutes of Health, primarily working with low-field MRI (0.55 tesla) and the use of oxygen as a contrast agent for lung imaging. Since 2022, I have been a resident physician in clinical physiology at Karolinska University Hospital and later Växjö Hospital in Region Kronoberg, while continuing my research at Karolinska Institutet supported primarily by the Swedish Heart-Lung Foundation and the Swedish Society of Medicine.

My teaching experience primarily consists of teaching medical students in the fourth semester clinical ECG interpretation skills and finding ways to improve how that can be taught. That is how I have spent 250+ scheduled teaching hours of lectures, seminars, demonstrations and examinations since 2015. Other than that, I have supervised a number of medical students and PhD students.