BBSRC ICURe: Quantified Imaging

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Quantified Imaging will enable hospitals to take advantage of two new types of MRI scan, called arterial spin labelling (ASL) and chemical exchange saturation transfer (CEST). These can be used on existing hospital MRI scanners, are cheaper and safer than the alternatives, and offer entirely new ways of understanding disease. For example, they can be used to probe the early stages of dementia, assess cancer severity without biopsy or monitor a patient's response to treatment.Professor Michael Chappell's research group (previously at the University of Oxford, now at the University of Nottingham) produce the world's leading ASL and CEST software tools for academic use, drawing on years of successful Government-funded projects with clinical impact. Currently, these tools are not used in hospitals because they are complex to operate. The opportunity we have identified is to make our tools accessible for non-specialist users, which will enable more patients to benefit from ASL and CEST scans. We propose to develop a comprehensive and integrated ASL/CEST software package for routine hospital use.Medical imaging will play a key role in addressing the healthcare challenges imposed by an ageing population, and thus this project aligns with the UK Government's grand challenge area of _Healthy Ageing_. A topical example is Alzheimer's disease: the new medicine _lecanemab_ has recently been shown to slow the progression of disease if treatment is started early. ASL can detect the early-stage symptoms of Alzheimer's and could therefore be used for population screening. By identifying patients that need treatment at an earlier date, fewer patients would end up requiring expensive full-time care in their later years, which saves money for healthcare systems. Because of this, the chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on dementia has stated that there should be a renewed focus on early detection: ASL can provide this safely and cheaply.