Physical Sciences of Imaging in the Biomedical Sciences: Designing a Molecular Imaging System

The University of Birmingham is offering the opportunity for further study at the interface between the different science, engineering and medicine disciplines, providing a career route for graduates to the imaging industry, pushing the boundaries of this field to improve health care.

We are proposing to develop a novel tomographic imaging system in three dimensions to show the size, location and contrast of molecular beacons and markers which can be used to quantify specific cellular activity. The main areas of our research will be (i) a novel data collection system to allow tomographic image reconstruction without organism or system movement, ii) the use of diffuse optical imaging (DOT) to quantify the optical spectral properties of tissue under investigation, (iii) a novel imaging setup to obtain spectral optical signals using single view transmission data, (iv) the quantification of specific cellular activity from bioluminescence data, (v) imaging algorithms to recover tissue patho-physiology as a function of measured data and (vi) evaluations of the completed system in imaging and stem cell research to assess new treatments areas ranging from inherited metabolic disorders to chronic liver damage.

Supervisors: Dr H Dehghani, Dr I B Styles, Prof J Frampton.

Applications for entry in 2013 are open to students that have, or expect to obtain, a good 2:1 (Hons) or 1st class degree (or equivalent EU/overseas degree) in a physical scientific subject (Chemistry, Physics, Materials Science, Natural Sciences, Computer Science, Engineering or Mathematics accepted).