Completed Engineering

King's College London Medical Engineering Centre of Research Excellence

In plain English

AI plain-English summary

A team of imaging scientists, engineers, and clinicians at King’s College London is renewing a research centre that turns medical scans into sharper tools for diagnosing and treating brain, heart, and cancer diseases. This matters because many complex diseases—such as depression, heart failure, or aggressive tumours—are poorly understood and difficult to treat with current imaging methods. The centre combines expertise in physics, chemistry, and computation with cutting-edge scanners on a hospital campus, allowing researchers to tackle problems that no single discipline can solve alone. For example, they can develop new contrast agents that reveal hidden tumour boundaries or algorithms that detect early signs of dementia from routine MRI scans. If successful, the centre will accelerate the translation of laboratory discoveries into clinical practice and commercial medical devices. It will also train the next generation of research leaders and recruit international talent, strengthening the UK’s position in medical engineering. Public engagement activities will help patients and the public understand how imaging research directly affects their care. The work is applied, not fundamental science—its primary goal is to improve diagnosis and treatment within a few years.

View original technical description
The proposed Centre in Medical Engineering focuses on medical imaging, and is a renewal of our existing Centre. Our vision is to bring together teams from multiple scientific disciplines to identify and solve complex multi-factorial challenges, focusing on the most important clinical and biological issues. By combining expertise in biomedical and clinical research with excellence in underpinning sciences of imaging engineering & physics, computational and mathematical approaches and imaging chemistry, we will deliver impact that improves the understanding, diagnosis and treatment of neuropsychiatric, oncological and cardiovascular diseases. The Centre will have a unique combination of characteristics that allow delivery of this vision. The current critical mass of imaging scientists combines with cutting-edge facilities across multiple imaging modalities, strong industrial links and our location within a major hospital campus to create an exciting, synergistic environment where the most challenging questions can be addressed. In addition to producing world-leading outputs, the Centre infrastructure will accelerate translation to clinical benefit and industrial uptake. The Centre will act as a focus for recruitment of leading international talent and training of the next generation of research leaders, enhancing excellence. We will make a major contribution to public engagement, enhancing the strong current activity.

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Researchers

Reza Razavi (EPMC Awardee)

Related Research

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Original classification

Wellcome Trust Centre

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