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Medicolegal Expert in Neuroradiology
Biography
Professor Alan Jackson provides expert witness reports in the field of neuroradiology.
He qualified from the University of Manchester with an honours degree in 1984 having previously completed a PhD in neuroanatomy in 1981. He was admitted to the Royal College of Physicians in 1987 and into the Royal College of Radiologists in 1990. He was admitted as Fellow to both the Royal College of Physicians in 2003 and the British Institute of Radiology in 2007. He holds the European Diploma of Neuroradiology.
In 1995 Professor Jackson was appointed as a Consultant Neuroradiologist at Manchester Royal Infirmary and Senior Lecturer in Neuroradiology at the University of Manchester. Later the same year he was appointed as Professor of Neuroradiology at the University of Manchester. He retired from clinical practice in February 2019 but remains Emeritus Professor of Radiology at the University of Manchester.
He has led his own research group from the early 1990s and was instrumental in establishing Manchester as a leading centre for clinical imaging research. He has obtained over £30 million in research funding, has contributed to over 50 textbooks and has published over 350 papers in peer-reviewed journals.
Professor Jackson's main areas of clinical interest include neuro-oncology, neurovascular and neurodegenerative diseases, as well as the development and testing of advanced imaging techniques including CT, MRI and PET imaging. He has also published in the areas of arachnoiditis, traumatic brain injury and brain diseases associated with ageing. He has a particular interest in the importance of incidental findings discovered during clinical or research scanning investigations. From 1995 until 2019 he was responsible for clinical management of the CT, MR and PET imaging systems at Manchester University in addition to leading a research group studying advanced imaging techniques. He has been director of the Wolfson Molecular Imaging Centre at the University of Manchester from 2007-2019 and Joint Director of the CRUK and EPSRC cancer imaging research centre in Cambridge and Manchester.
Professor Jackson’s research in neurovascular disease led to the development of biomarkers which provide specific indicators of microvascular arterial disease, direct measurement of arterial system compliance and measurement of regional arteriolar and venular blood flow. These novel biomarkers have been validated in vascular and mixed vascular dementia and in treatment resistant late-onset depression. He has also studied the role of cerebral micro-emboli in degenerative and vascular dementias and developed methods to quantify dysfunction of cerebro-vascular autoregulation. His group has an international reputation in the development of biomarkers of the vascular microenvironment in tumours and in microvascular brain disease. Recent work focuses on the development of techniques for classification of tumoral heterogeneity using combination biomarkers derived from multimodality imaging, the quantification of oxygen contrast-enhanced MRI to study oxygen delivery and tissue hypoxia and the development of novel instrumentation to quantify autoregulatory cerebral function using MRI.
During his career, Professor Jackson has had significant editorial roles for a number of journals, including Associate Editor of the British Journal of Radiology from 2005-2010 and a member of the Science committee for European Radiology from 2001 to 2006. He was director of the Wellcome Trust CRF imaging facility from 2005-2012, as Associate Medical Director for Imaging for the North, Central and South Manchester primary care trusts from 2006-2008.
Professor Jackson has been heavily involved in postgraduate medical education supervising over 30 medically qualified doctoral candidates to the degrees of MD and PhD.
He has been a medicolegal expert in neuroradiology for the past five years during which he has acted in over 200 cases on behalf of both plaintiffs and defendants. His medicolegal work has included medical malpractice, fitness to practice reviews as well as commercial and criminal cases.