Background

With a rapidly ageing global population and challenges such as the growth of antibiotic resistance, there has been significant growth in the global incidence of chronic and infectious health conditions. Furthermore, the number of people living with two or more chronic health conditions is forecast to treble by 2030. In the light of this, EPSRC introduced a set of Grand Challenges for Healthcare Technologies and issued a strategic call in 2015 to set up a number of Centres for Mathematics in Healthcare within the UK, where the remit of the Centres is to develop and apply modern mathematical ideas to problems of potential impact to healthcare.

As a result of this call, five EPSRC Mathematics for Healthcare Centres, based at Cambridge, Exeter Glasgow, Imperial and Liverpool have been funded to a total of £10m. These Centres were established in 2016 and aim to establish an ongoing programme of research and impact activities in this area, beyond the lifetime of the initial funding period. In addition to their complementary research programmes, the Centres are nurturing a new generation of researchers able to bring advanced mathematical techniques to new areas of healthcare and medicine.

Aims and Objectives

This joint workshop of the five Centres focused on translating mathematical research into technological advances, as well as outreach and linkage with clinicians and end-user companies. It presented the opportunity to hear in detail about the project collaborations, research and outcomes from each Centre. The programme aimed not only to nurture the mathematical research associated with the Centres, but to engage end-users to ensure that best practice is spread as widely as possible.

The Programme featured talks from all five Centres. The themes of ‘Clinical Support Systems’, ‘Population Medicine ’ and ‘Mathematical Challenges” were explored. Talks covered a range of topics, including cross-methodology challenges for specific disease groups, cross-disease challenges for specific methodologies and machine learning customised for medical imaging.

This workshop also aimed to coordinate and consolidate the research agenda within the Maths for Healthcare space for the subsequent five years and scope out a proposal for a six month Research Programme on the Mathematics of Healthcare to be held at the Isaac Newton Institute.

The event was of interest to researchers, clinicians and healthcare technologists from biomedical imaging, mathematics, engineering, computer science, biology and medicine and presents the opportunity for knowledge exchange and networking between senior scientists with relevant individuals from industry and government.

Registration and Venue

This event was by invitation only. 
The registration fee and accommodation was covered for academics directly affiliated with one of the Centres. The registration fee for those invited from industry was covered, but they needed to pay for accommodation. 

A workshop dinner took place at Robinson College on Wednesday 10^th April at 19.00.

Accommodation was reserved locally at Murray Edwards College and was charged at £75 per night.

Feedback

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The five EPSRC Mathematics for Healthcare Centres are:

EPSRC Centre for Mathematical and Statistical Analysis of Multimodal Clinical Imaging, University of Cambridge is based at the University of Cambridge and aims to achieve synergies between applied mathematics and statistics through the focus on the analysis of clinical imaging, particularly that arising in neurological, cardiovascular and oncological imaging. The Centre is a collaboration between mathematics, engineering, physics and biomedical scientists and clinicians.

EPSRC Centre for Predictive Modelling in Healthcare, University of Exeter. This centre aims to improve the diagnosis, prognosis and treatment of chronic conditions, in particular in cardiac, endocrine and neurological disorders. It includes three streams: a theoretical stream on data-model fusion and transient dynamics in continuum and network models of disease, a stream for endocrine and electrophysiological modelling and a translational stream.

EPSRC Centre for Multiscale Soft Tissue Mechanics (SofTMech), Universities of Glasgow, St Andrews, Heriot-Watt & Sheffield. This interdisciplinary Centre for Mathematics in Healthcare is focused on soft tissue mechanics. It combines expertise from the heart and cancer communities to develop a generic multiscale mathematical framework for soft tissue mechanics that spans subcellular, cellular, multicellular, tissue and organ scales. It is developing a range of novel multiscale mathematical models and computer-intensive statistical inference techniques applicable to heart diseases, cancer and beyond.

EPSRC Centre for Mathematics of Precision Healthcare, Imperial College, London. This centre provides a venue for new mathematics, new data analysis pipelines, bringing together Imperial’s mathematicians, engineers and computer scientists with medical scientists and clinicians to address such issues across different areas in healthcare, from patient journeys to population-level analyses.

EPSRC Centre for Mathematics in Healthcare, University of Liverpool is based at the University of Liverpool and is carrying out multidisciplinary research to explore how mathematics and statistics can deliver a more refined and accurate set of predictive models and tools for personalised healthcare delivery. It brings together collaborating mathematicians, scientists, engineers and clinicians at the Universities of Liverpool and Lancaster with industrial partners and policy.