Completed Computing & AI Cells, Biochemistry & Physiology

LSI DTCs 2007: Physical sciences of imaging in the biomedical sciences (PSIBS)

Funder EPSRC (part of UKRI)
Recipient organisation University of Birmingham
Funding £7.2M
Period Sept 2008 — Mar 2018

In plain English

AI plain-English summary

The UK is training a new generation of researchers who can build better medical imaging tools and write the software to make sense of the pictures they produce. This matters because imaging technology now advances faster than standard research grants can keep up. Hospitals, drug companies, and biology labs all need people who understand both the physics behind a scanner and the computational methods needed to extract useful information from the flood of data it generates. Currently, UK graduates typically hold a single-discipline degree—physics or biology or computer science—but not the cross-disciplinary skills needed to push imaging forward. The PSIBS Doctoral Training Centre fills that gap by teaching cohorts of students together, upgrading their foundational knowledge and then letting them tackle PhD projects that span physics, biology, and computation. If this succeeds, the UK will have a steady pipeline of researchers who can respond quickly to new imaging challenges—spotting disease earlier, tracking drug effects in living tissue, or making scans faster and safer. These are people who will move into industry, academia, and hospitals, keeping the UK competitive in a field that quietly underpins modern medicine.

View original technical description
The PSIBS Doctoral Training Centre (DTC) will focus on the development of the physical sciences of imaging and the computational analysis of image data to address key problems in the biological and biomedical sciences.The importance of Imaging to Bioscience and Medicine has been highlighted both by the N111 and the UK research councils.There is art apparent and growing need for people with these skills within UK industries with diverse business focuses (proposal section 3). This is reflected by their involvement in this PSIBS DTC and their contributions to the training.Two key benefits of training cohorts of students rather than individually funded students are: (1) The PSIBS multi-disciplinary taught programme that will upgrade the skill- and knowledge-base of traditional UK bachelors-level single-discipline graduates to underpin and enable cross-disciplinary PhD research. (ii) The students will develop extensive and cross-disciplinary links and networks, both with other PSIBS students and the many PSIBS academics, which will persist throughout their future research careers.Imaging technology is evolving faster than the standard grant turnaround time and dynamic, responsive PhD research within a critical mass of experts will enable (a) rapid response and (b) cutting edge research against our overseas competitors (proposal section 4).

View the original record at the funder ↗

Researchers

Michael Hannon (Principal Investigator)

Related Research

Grants with similar aims, by meaning.

Life Sciences Interface Doctoral Training Centre
EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Training in Medical Imaging
EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Training in Smart Medical Imaging at King's College London and Imperial College London
EPSRC and MRC Centre for Doctoral Training in Biomedical Imaging
EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Training in Intelligent, Integrated Imaging In Healthcare (i4health)

Original classification

Training Grant

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