Background

Following its successful launch in March 2016, the new EPSRC Centre for Mathematical Imaging in Healthcare (CMIH)  announced its first annual user engagement/industry day. The Centre was created following the announcement in December 2015 from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) of a £10 million investment in five new UK Research Centres. The remit of the centres is to explore how mathematics and statistics can help clinicians to tackle serious health challenges such as cancer, heart disease and antibiotic resistant bacteria. Specifically, researchers will develop new tools from predictive mathematical models to enable earlier diagnosis of chronic diseases such as epilepsy, and new systems to make clinical imaging more accurate and efficient.

CMIH 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 oncology imaging. The new Centre is a collaboration between mathematics, engineering, physics and biomedical scientists and clinicians.

This event presented an opportunity to hear in detail about some of the current project collaborations, other industry challenges and explore new potential collaborations.
 

Aims and Objectives

Many of the challenges for this area emanate from issues around Big Data. The amount of data that imaging generates is phenomenal, yet it is in a non-traditional form which requires new mathematics and statistics to reveal the inherent knowledge it possesses. The Cambridge Centre will play a significant role in enabling mathematicians and statisticians to help overcome some of the big challenges facing the NHS.

This user engagement day provided an update on research projects and collaborations, as well as highlighting potential new ones. It featured presentations of some of the current project collaborations.

A number of industry challenges and new collaborations were also highlighted in short talks in the second session. An EPSRC presentation provided an update on the strategy and vision for this £10 million investment into high quality multidisciplinary research for better healthcare technologies and systems. The EPSRC Centre for Mathematics of Precision Healthcare at Imperial outlined in detail the research and collaborations taking place and the day finished with a short discussion and question session. A poster exhibition ran during the lunch and the drinks/networking session.

This event was of interest to researchers working in the field of analysis of clinical imaging and also to healthcare planners, clinicians, policy makers and industry partners to discuss the research projects and challenges arising from the area. It presented a great opportunity for knowledge exchange and networking between senior scientists from areas such as mathematics, statistics, engineering, physics and biomedicine and relevant individuals from industry and government.

Registration and Venue

The workshop took place at the Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences in Cambridge. Please see the Isaac Newton Institute website for further information about the venue.