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2021 SINAPSE ASM
The 2021 SINAPSE Annual Scientific Meeting will take place on Thursday-Friday, 17-18 June 2021, highlighting the latest developments in clinical and experimental imaging for researchers across Scotland. Although the ongoing COVID-19 situation impedes early confirmation of whether this will take place in person, online, or as a hybrid event, we are delighted to welcome Prof Sue Francis and Prof Michael Ewers as keynote speakers, and we also look forward to proffered papers and posters representing the full breadth of SINAPSE imaging research. The deadline for abstract submission is 12th March 2021. More details...
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New online course on MATLAB for Image Analysis
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Co-organised by the SINAPSE Image Analysis topic group and MathWorks, we are very pleased to announce an online course for SINAPSE members on MATLAB for Image Analysis. The course will begin next Monday, 8th February 2021 (2-4pm), and then continue on a fortnightly basis on Mondays at the same time. No previous knowledge of programming is required.
The first session will offer a general 'Introduction to MATLAB' to cover the basics, then following hands-on sessions are planned to cover topics including image processing, machine learning, deep learning, and visualisation. Course participants will have the opportunity to get feedback from MATLAB developers directly and to learn from them. Registration is now open. More details...
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Recent awards to SINAPSE members
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Congratulations to Dr Michelle Williams (University of Edinburgh) on being awarded an Intermediate Clinical Research Fellowship by the British Heart Foundation! The funding will support her research using machine learning algorithms to detect undiagnosed coronary heart disease on chest CT.
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Edinburgh Imaging news round-up
January news headlines from Edinburgh Imaging include an MRI Research Radiographer vacancy, the 47th RCPE Sir John Halliday Croom Prize awarded to Dr Una Clancy, and the arrival of blood-brain barrier imaging researcher Dr Axel Montagne as a new Chancellor’s Fellow. More details...
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Funding calls
Currently open funding calls which may be of interest to SINAPSE researchers:
SINAPSE Online Training Bursary Fund
Funding available for SINAPSE members to register for fee-charging online courses or conferences that will enhance their training and/or skills development related to imaging research. Applications are accepted on a rolling basis.
Tenovus Scotland pilot grants
Up to £20k for pump priming studies of up to 18 months’ duration for medical research in Scotland, with preference given to early career investigators. Closing date (for this call, open to applications from the Strathclyde region): 15 February
SBRI Competition: Improving multimorbidity acute care using data analytics
Funding from Health Innovation South East Scotland to develop a data-driven solution to improve the care and outcomes for patients with multimorbidity admitted to A&E. Up to five organisations will receive £10k to perform a 3-month technical feasibility study, followed by two organisations winning £55k to develop a prototype and undertake field testing. Closing date: 3 March
Wellcome Trust PhD Programmes for Health Professionals
Funding available to single organisations or consortia for PhD programmes to support health professionals in their research careers. Closing date: 4 March
NEW Academy of Medical Sciences Starter Grants for Clinical Lecturers
Up to £30k for research costs, to support Clinical Lecturers who are looking to develop and strengthen their research careers. Closing date: 8 March
NEW Tenovus Scotland pilot grants
Up to £12k for pump priming studies of up to 18 months’ duration for medical research in Scotland, with preference given to early career investigators. Closing date (for this call, open to applications from the Grampian region): 24 March
NEW Cancer Research UK Activate Challenge
Applications are invited for places on a programme tailored for CRUK funded researchers in Scotland that includes coaching, entrepreneurial training and financial support for strengthening the impact of cancer research through translation and commercialisation. Closing date: 30 March
NEW SBRI Competition: Improving Hip Fracture Outcomes Using Data
Funding from Health Innovation South East Scotland to improve outcomes for hip fracture patients by developing a system using routinely collected health data and data-analytics techniques. Up to three organisations will receive £15k to perform a 3-month technical feasibility study, followed by two organisations winning £57.5k to develop a prototype and undertake field testing. Closing date: 31 March
NEW MRC Health Systems Research Initiative foundation grant
Up to £200k for exploratory or pilot work to generate new knowledge to strengthen and improve health systems in low and middle-income countries. Closing date: 26 May
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Reminder: PICTURES Safe Haven and Medical Imaging Tools survey
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The deadline to respond to a very short survey on image data research needs, with the chance to win a £50 Amazon voucher, is tomorrow: 2 February.
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Responses are sought from anyone who uses or wants to use medical images as part of their research, including researchers, clinicians, radiologists, and computer scientists. Less experienced image data researchers are strongly encouraged to share their views! More details...
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Image of the Month: OCTA retinal image segmentation
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Our February Image of the Month, courtesy of Ylenia Giarratano, Dr Tom MacGillivray and Dr Miguel Bernabeu, shows shows an original optical coherence tomography angiography (OCTA) image of the retina (left panel) acquired with the RTVue-XR Avanti OCT system, and the performance of three automated image segmentation methods used to perform vessel enhancement and binarization (right panels): an optimally oriented flux (OOF) handcrafted filter and two deep learning architectures, U-Net and CS-Net. Evaluation metrics applied to automated segmentation results for retinal scan subimages from 11 individuals found the best performance was achieved by U-Net and CS-Net architectures, and identified OOF as the best handcrafted filter for applications where manually segmented data are not available to retrain those approaches. The source code and the image dataset with associated ground truth manual segmentations have been made openly available to support standardization efforts in OCTA image segmentation.
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Celebrating diversity in imaging research: Dr Akira O'Connor
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Akira O'Connor is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Psychology and Neuroscience at University of St Andrews.
Q: What is your area of research and how do you use imaging?
A: I'm interested in how we make decisions about what we do and don't remember. We tend to assume that what we say we remember reflects in black and white the 'contents' of our memories. But more often than not, there are many sources of information that feed into these decisions, creating more of a grey area than even we are aware of. One situation where the grey area looms large is the sensation of deja vu – the feeling that a situation is familiar, combined with the awareness that this familiarity is incorrect. A curious thing about deja vu is that, unlike many memory errors, it happens more in younger people and declines as we reach middle age. It's an experience that teases apart memory systems from decision-making systems, and shows us that even as memory systems err, decision-making systems can keep us on track.
I use fMRI to identify the neural substrates that support memory and decision-making systems. Imaging data complements the behavioural data I get from cognitive experiments, meaning that all of my work is founded on strong experimental design.
Q: Can you tell us a bit about your life outside of research?
A: I grew up in London to Japanese and Irish parents... I suppose my name is a bit of a giveaway. I have spent significant periods of my life in Leeds, St Louis, and for the past 10 years, St Andrews. I live near Cupar and enjoy running the trails and roads of Fife.
Q: Why do you consider it important to raise visibility of diverse imaging researchers?
A: I consider it important to raise the visibility of all historically marginalised groups as part of a broader effort to reduce entrenched societal disadvantage. Beyond the often-overlooked boost that simply seeing someone who looks like you makes you feel less isolated, the standard response to this question is that raising visibility of diversity can help establish to those from marginalised communities that a profession is a viable one for them. That's all well and good, but it runs the risk of out-sourcing solving the problem to those experiencing it ("you've seen the pictures, now get the education and do the job!"). Visibility raising needs to be combined with active efforts to deal with systemic disadvantage (economic, educational) and a lack of social mobility, and that's a much broader issue that research and higher education institutions, along with government, need to be taking more responsibility for.
Focusing specifically on the efforts of organisations to promote themselves as diverse, the easiest way to raise visibility is to raise diversity such that any representation becomes diverse representation. I worry when I see organisations celebrating a representation of diversity that doesn't actually exist outside the cherry-picked situations in their brochures and videos.
Q: What is one thing SINAPSE members can do to contribute to equity/inclusion in our research community?
A: Lobby your university or organisation to embody the diversity it would seek to present to others. If your promotional materials are full of people of colour in ways that are unrepresentative of the working environment you know, ask the organisation what it is doing to make that representation a reality.
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Volunteers needed!
Our pan-Scotland research network values and benefits from diversity. We have launched this monthly feature to profile SINAPSE members as example individuals who presently may be less likely to come to mind as a “typical” imaging researcher because of characteristics including disability, race/ethnicity, gender, sexuality, gender identity, socio-economic background, and country of origin. To contribute, please consider either volunteering yourself or encouraging colleagues to volunteer to be profiled, so that all individuals can see their identities represented and welcomed in the SINAPSE membership. More details...
[ Reminder: As described in previous newsletters, this monthly feature is being run among other initiatives in which SINAPSE is participating toward improving inclusion and diversity in Scotland's STEM research community. This includes a longer-term 'Breaking Barriers' project, in collaboration with other STEM-focused research pools, looking at where the key issues lie and in understanding what we can do to address them. Anyone interested in joining working groups to drive change in this setting, please e-mail kristin.flegal@glasgow.ac.uk] |
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