CMIH Spring 2017 Newsletter

by

Rachel Furner

Welcome to the spring 2017 newsletter. We've had another busy few months here at the CMIH, welcoming Post-Doctoral Research Associate Bogdan Roman to the team, building on projects within the centre, and showcasing our work to a variety of audiences. We're also busy planning an academic workshop in April focusing on medical imaging, alongside the Liverpool Centre for Mathematics in Healthcare, find out more below! Read on for more information on a range of our activities, and please share this newsletter with friends or colleagues who may be interested.

Cancer Research UK Cambridge Institute 10 year anniversary

Cancer Research UK Cambridge Institute celebrated its 10 year anniversary last month, recognising a decade of cutting edge research, following the opening of the centre by the Queen back in February 2007 . This was the first UK institute built to focus solely on cancer research and is one of Europe’s largest cancer research facilities. To celebrate the 10th Anniversary the centre hosted a two day symposium, and were visited by the Duke of Gloucester.

CMIH investigator Stephanie Reichelt, who is head of light microscopy at the institute was one of the first staff members to join, she says:

“My first visit to this building was in big rubber boots, a helmet and a fluorescent vest and we were just walking along empty rooms.

“There were concrete walls and there was nothing in the labs then. I had to start from scratch, build up a team and find the right equipment for the research in our lab.

“Over the past ten years our focus has always been to stay at the cutting-edge of research and that means working together to develop new techniques and technology that will help us make discoveries and breakthroughs that can benefit patients.

“One of the special things for me about working in this building is the people who come and visit us. We have fundraisers coming through our lab and asking us about our work and what we are doing. That is very valuable as it gives us a purpose and reminds us why we’re doing this. The purpose is not just to create more knowledge, it is to find cures for cancers.”

Developments in Healthcare Imaging – Connecting with Academia
The next CMIH event, 'Developments in Healthcare Imaging – Connecting with Academia', will be held on April 19th at the Issac Newton Institute. It aims to bring together leading academics from the field of medical imaging, including imaging technology and image analysis methods, to address current challenges. New imaging technology goes side by side with the need for mathematical models to maximise the information gained from these novel imaging techniques. This event presents an opportunity to hear in detail about some of the current academic interactions taking place in the field, with presentations from leading scientists as well as 'flash talks' and posters from the centre's PDRAs and other scientists. For further information, and to register, please use the link below.

CRUK Global Challenge Winners announced
Cancer Research UK announced the recipients of its global Grand Challenge competition last month. Four international teams will share £70m of funding, focusing on some of the biggest challenges in cancer research. We are delighted that researchers from CRUK-Cambridge Institute, are involved in two of the winning bids; the first one working to develop a way to combine new and existing technologies to create virtual representations of tumours, and a global database that catalogues their genetic make-up and metabolism and the second one creating a virtual reality 3D tumour map which will allow scientists and doctors to examine the cellular and molecular make-up of a patient’s entire tumour to improve diagnosis and treatment for the disease.

The CMIH and the EPSRC Centre for Predictive Modelling in Healthcare, based at the University of Exeter hosted a one day workshop on 'Uncertainty Quantification in the Mathematics of Healthcare' in January, at the Royal Statistics Society. The workshop bought together academics from the EPSRC healthcare centres, along with others in the field of mathematics of healthcare, to discuss leading issues on uncertainty quantification. These included the use of mathematical and statistical techniques that enable us to estimate uncertainties, how to reduce them by calibration with data (inverse modelling) and communication of uncertainty. Talks were given by representatives of each of the EPSRC healthcare centres, as well as from Mark Tarplee (Healthcare Technologies Manager, EPSRC), Dr Gary Mirams (University of Nottingham) and Professor Sir David Spiegelhalter (Winton Centre, University of Cambridge). Slides from the event can be found here.

This term Sarah Bohndiek along with a number of colleagues within the CMIH and beyond have lectured a part III course on Medical Physics, educating the next generation on imaging techniques used in medicine, and the benefits and risks associated with these. More information and the course material is available here.

The Bohndiek lab have also recently launched a youtube channel, featuring work done by the group looking at medical physics. The first video in their series looks at a day in the life of one of their research team, Travis Sawyer.

Alongside this we have continued our fortnightly seminar series, with talks from CMIH Investigator, Martin Graves from CUH on 'MRI: how can we help each other', and ATI fellow Mihaela Van de Schaar from Oxford on 'Advancing Medicine through Data Science, Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence'.

CMIH were involved in two summer projects back in 2016 which showcased at the Science Fair on March 25th 2017.
One project looked at 'face fusion'; A photo booth was set up, taking photos of volunteer's faces, which were then fused with an image of another persons face. There were many choices of people to 'fuse' with, including celebrities and well known figures! The mathematics behind this, described in Benning et al (2017), analysed the two images to find particular 'landmarks' which were then used to re-map one image onto another, giving a fused image. Plus magazine have covered this story in more detail here.
The second project was a simplified demonstration of tomography. A volunteer posed on a rotating turntable between a light source and a screen, projecting a series of 2-d shadows onto the screen as they were rotated. On the other side of the screen the 2-d images were captured at a set frequency, and from these a 3-d reconstruction was produced, using similar mathematics to that used in hospitals for CT reconstruction!

Awards and Recognition

Congratulations to our faculty for a variety of achievements over the last few months, in particular;

Sarah Bohndiek was awarded the JNM Alavi Mandell Award 2016, in recognition of her publications within JNM.

Richard Samworth was awarded the Adams prize in recognition of his work on statistical analysis of big data.

Carola Schönlieb was appointed as an editor for IMA Journal of Numerical Analysis, and as a section editor for the SIAM Review.

As well as winning the above mentioned award, Sarah Bohndiek was also appointed as an editor of the IoP Journal of Optics, and appointed to the CRUK Multidisciplinary Expert Review Panel.

Upcoming events

Developments in Healthcare Imaging – Connecting with Academia, 19th April 2017, Cambridge, UK
BHF and CMPH annual symposium; The Heart – Models, Measurements, Medicine, 5th June 2017, London, UK
Third Workshop on Soft Tissue Modelling, 7th-9th June 2017, Glasgow, UK
BIOMAT-2017: Mathematical Models in Biomedical Imaging, 12th-14th June 2017, Granada, Spain.
Cambridge BRAINfest, 23rd-25th June 2017, Cambridge
Big Data in Medicine: Tools, Transformation and Translation, 4th July 2017, Cambridge, UK
Isaac Newton Institute Programme on Variational methods and effective algorithms for imaging and vision, August - December 2017, Isaac Newton Institute, Cambridge, UK
Isaac Newton Institute Programme on Statistical Scalability, January to June 2018, Isaac Newton Institute, Cambridge, UK

Keep an eye on our events page to find out about other upcoming events and for information about our seminar series which is open to all!

Recent CMIH publications

Adcock B, Hansen A, Roman B. (2016). A Note on Compressed Sensing of Structured Sparse Wavelet Coefficients From Subsampled Fourier Measurements. IEEE Signal Processing Letters, 23 (5), pp. 732-736

Adcock B, Hansen A, Poon C, Roman B, (2017). Breaking the coherence barrier: A new theory for compressed sensing. Forum of Mathematics, Sigma, 2017

Aston JAD, Pigoli D, Tavakoli S. (2017). Tests for separability in nonparametric covariance operators of random surfaces. Annals of Statistics, pp. in press

Bastounis, A, Hansen, A. C. (2017). On the absence of uniform recovery in many real-world applications of compressed sensing and the RIP & nullspace property in levels. SIAM Journal on Imaging Sciences pp. 1-37

De los Reyes J, Schönlieb C, Valkonen T. (2016). Bilevel Parameter Learning for Higher-Order Total Variation Regularisation Models. Journal of Mathematical Imaging and Vision, 57 (1), pp. 1-25

Ehrhardt M, Markiewicz P, Liljeroth M, Barnes A, Kolehmainen V, Duncan J, Pizarro L.. Arridge S. (2016). PET Reconstruction With an Anatomical MRI Prior Using Parallel Level Sets. IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging, 35 (9), pp. 2189-2199

Grah J, Harrington J, Koh S, Pike J, Schreiner A, Burger M, Schönlieb C.. Reichelt S. (2017). Mathematical imaging methods for mitosis analysis in live-cell phase contrast microscopy. Methods, pp. 91-99

Huang Y, Teng Z, Elkhawad M, Tarkin J, Joshi N, Boyle J, Buscombe J.. Rudd J. (2016). High Structural Stress and Presence of Intraluminal Thrombus Predict Abdominal Aortic Aneurysm 18 F-FDG Uptake - Insights From Biomechanics. Circulation: Cardiovascular Imaging, 9 (11), pp. e004656

Jones A, Tamtögl A, Calvo-Almazán I, Hansen A. (2016). Continuous Compressed Sensing for Surface Dynamical Processes with Helium Atom Scattering. Scientific reports, pp. 27776

Lila E, Aston J, Sangalli L. (2016). Smooth Principal Component Analysis over two-dimensional manifolds with an application to neuroimaging. The Annals of Applied Statistics, 10 (4), pp. 1854-1879

Sayal H, Aston J, Elliott D, Ombao H. (2016). An introduction to applications of wavelet benchmarking with seasonal adjustment. Journal of the Royal Statistical Society: Series A (Statistics in Society)

Funding Opportunity

The CMIH welcomes applications for grants of all sizes, for projects which further the field of mathematical imaging for healthcare. For further information, including the application process, visit our website.

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