The UCL Centre for Medical Image Computing

在过去的30年里，核磁共振、CT和超声波等数字医学成像技术已经改变了医疗保健行业。计算方法现在可以用来测量组织和器官在形状、结构和功能上非常细微的变化。这正在改变我们对痴呆症、关节炎和癌症等目前无法治愈的疾病的理解方式。这些技术使我们能够开发新的方法来改进我们评估新疗法效果的方法。医学成像提供1毫米或更大空间尺度的信息，但疾病通过分子过程、细胞功能和细胞分布的变化表现出来。光学方法可以用来研究体内的这些过程，所以我们需要将微米尺度的信息与我们在毫米尺度的医学成像中看到的信息联系起来。有了这些信息，我们将能够开发新的方法，利用图像来指导治疗和干预癌症、脑部疾病、骨骼和关节紊乱以及心血管疾病的治疗。这项平台拨款将为我们提供资源，以确保我们优秀的物理学家、计算机科学家和数学家团队的安全。它还将使我们能够灵活地处理出现的新研究途径，而不会造成在获得资金方面的时间延误。该资源将使我们能够在医学成像与细胞和分子生物学之间的界面上探索更多的投机研究途径；以及在生物学、纳米技术和量子物理的界面上进行计算成像的机会。

Digital medical imaging technologies such as MRI, CT and ultrasound have transformed healthcare in the last 3 decades. Computational methods are now becoming available to measure very subtle changes in shape, structure and function of tissue and organs. This is changing the ways that we understand currently incurable diseases such as dementias, arthritis and cancer. These same technologies are allowing us to develop new ways of improving the ways we assess how well new treatments are working. Medical imaging provides information at the spatial scale of 1 mm or greater yet disease manifests itself by changes in molecular processes, cellular function and cellular distributions. Optical methods are becoming available to study these processes in-vivo and so we need methods to relate information at the micron scale to what we can see in medical imaging at the millimetre scale. With this information we will be able to develop new methods to use images to guide therapy and interventions in the treatment of cancer, brain diseases, disorders of bones and joints and cardiovascular diseases.This platform grant will provide is with resources to secure our excellent team of physicists, computer scientists and mathematicians. It will also give us the flexibility to tackle new avenues of research as they arise without the time delay in obtaining funding that would otherwise result. The resource will allow us to explore more speculative avenues of research at the interfaces between medical imaging and cellular and molecular biology; and opportunities for computational imaging at the interface of biology, nanotechnology and quantum physics.