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“Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower,” said Apple’s Steve Jobs, and UWA’s innovation track record is certainly underscoring this University’s leadership in science.

The annual WA Innovator of the Year Awards celebrate home-grown technologies making an impact globally – and that’s exactly what Resonance Health’s unique imaging has achieved for the diagnosis and monitoring of liver disease.

The Perth-based company’s latest revolutionary technology was recently recognised with the 2014 WA Innovator of the Year Overall Winner award and the man at the helm of Resonance Health’s research is Professor Tim St Pierre, who heads UWA’s BioMagnetics Research Group.

The team – Associate Professor Mike House and PhD graduate Dr Wenjie Pang (School of Physics) and scientists from Resonance Health – recently developed a technology for non-invasively measuring fat concentration in the liver.

The new award-winning technology, HepaFat-Scan®, being commercialised by Resonance Health has applications in liver cancer surgery and management of the common condition of nonalcoholic fatty liver disease.

Previously, Professor St Pierre had consigned to history the invasive and often painful procedure of a liver biopsy that measured iron concentration in the liver. His team’s alternative technology easily piggy-backs onto the magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) available in major hospitals and it is now used worldwide.

Twenty years ago, Professor St Pierre and his colleagues raised puzzled eyebrows with their study of magnetism in medicine. Last year the man who revolutionised liver investigations delivered 55 lectures over four continents when the global Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers named him their Magnetic Society’s Distinguished Lecturer.

Today, with colleague Associate Professor Rob Woodward, the UWA researcher is working on a simple and cheap diagnostic tool for two of the world’s most challenging tropical diseases: Malaria and Bilhazia.

Another innovative technology that collected an Innovator of the Year Award was the Microscopein- a-Needle developed by UWA’s Optical + Biomedical Engineering Laboratory – see The world’s smallest microscope takes on a big challenge .

Photo: UWA’s Professor Tim St Pierre, Chief Scientist of Resonance Health, the 2014 Innovator of the Year overall winner with Mitsubishi Corporation’s Wally Yamanaka and Commerce Minister Michael Mischin