The EPSRC-NIHR Healthcare Technology Co-operatives Partnership Network in Medical Image Analysis seeks to bring leading UK researchers in medical image analysis together to identify new opportunities for medical image analysis methodology research within the clinical areas of high morbidity/unmet need of the NIHR Cardiovascular HTC and HTC in Colorectal Therapies.
The HTCs are working with patient groups and clinicians on identifying unmet clinical needs in these areas. An aim of the Medical Image Analysis Network (MedIAN) is to bring together imaging scientists with different skills sets and experiences to consider how technological advances in how images are acquired and images (and associated information) are analysed can be applied to solve some of these problems.
The primary purpose of the Network is to encourage new collaborations to be set up between academic healthcare technologists, clinicians and industry partners to develop and evaluate new solutions. Network members are jointly tasked to work on some of the hardest medical image analysis problems there are today. The hope is that the resulting research will lead to new image-based biomarkers and quantification methods which will allow earlier detection of disease, and better stratification of disease so that the most appropriate therapy can be selected for a patient, and new image-based quantitative tools will lead to increases success of interventions and therapies and improve the overall well-being of patients with these conditions.
How is MedIAN aiming achieve this goal? MedIAN is encouraging the development of new collaborations through scientific meetings with other networks/organisations, Clinical Readiness events which allow clinicians to evaluate current methods, and Challenge competitions which allow the international medical image analysis community to benchmark method on given clinical problems.
This new award will augment the existing one by enabling a number of new activities to be run: People and Knowledge Exchanges between UK research groups for early career researchers, Medical Image Analysis hackathons, Scoping Workshops to help work-up grant proposals and the facilitation of two national meetings for early career researchers (ECRs) working in medical image analysis which will be run by ECRs for ECRs. The new award will also enable a new internet resource to be set up which aims to be a focal information portal for UK medical image analysis researchers and those who wish to work with them.
