A BioImagingUK Network: A Scientific Community Defining Strategic Initiatives for UK BioImaging.

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

By its very nature, cutting edge imaging depends on advanced hardware and expert personnel. In most cases, UK life scientists and medical researchers have access to the imaging infrastructures necessary to support their immediate work and significant investments by UK Research Councils and charities have built a number of world-class imaging facilities in academic departments and institutes across the UK. The imaging facilities at any individual institution, however, are usually driven by the local research priorities and not all imaging modalities at any single institution are at the state of the art. Furthermore, over the last decade enormous leaps have been made in imaging technology with advances in resolution, speed, sensitivity, signal processing, functional readouts and biophysical modelling - now reaching previously unimagined capabilities. The increasing sophistication and concomitant expense and complexity of this new technology, however, make it impractical to build and run cutting edge imaging technology at every site in the UK. While several individual sites have established specific expertise in one or more of these emerging imaging technologies, no single institution can provide all the imaging capabilities that can now be applied to biological questions and which will become increasingly necessary in modern bioscience. Nonetheless, if UK life scientists and medical researchers are going to stay at the international forefront of their fields, they need access to all of these technologies. Thus there is a critical need to define the imaging instrumentation and personnel infrastructure, access policies, and sustainable support mechanisms that must underpin UK science going forward. We have built BioImagingUK (http://bioimaginguk.org), a grassroots initiative to define strategic priorities, access policies, and sustainable practices for UK imaging science. That effort has built an aligned, committed consortium of imaging scientists and technologists who have contributed to a clear, public statement of strategy and policy for UK bioimaging.To date, BioImagingUK's activities include a series of community activities centred on organising our priorities, developing strategic statements, representing the interests of the UK bioimaging scientists, and coordinating UK's response to Euro-BioImaging's evolving activities and calls for proposals. This proposal seeks the first formal funding for BioImagingUK, to form a UK Network, that will be used to continue and expand BioImagingUK's activities.