Current and past projects in the Medical Imaging Group
Cortical Analysis of Romosozumab / Teriparatide Effects on the Spine
This is an industrial sponsored study looking at the effects of various drugs which aim to improve the quality of the cortical bone layer (the outer bone layer) in the spine. The aim is to identify the exact effect this drug has on cortical thickness, mass and density, and where this effect is concentrated, by applying novel image processing algorithms to Computed Tomography data.
The Effect of Denosumab on the Femoral Cortex
This is an industrial sponsored study concerning denosumab, a fully human monoclonal antibody which has been studied across a range of conditions
including osteoporosis, treatment-induced bone loss, bone metastases, multiple myeloma and rheumatoid arthritis, with a similar aim to the study above, but applied to the proximal (top part of the) femur.
Cortical Thickness Effects of Teriparatide.
This is an industrial sponsored study investigating the effects of antiresorptive drugs and teriparatide on the cortical bone in the proximal femur.
This is an EPSRC project in collaboration with the University Department of Radiology, Addenbrooke's Hospital. The aim is to produce a hybrid combining mechanically-swept and freehand 3D ultrasound. The new system will incorporate benefits from both the existing strategies and also offer some additional unique advantages. It will record dense regular data like the integrated 3D probe described above and will also acquire large data-sets as is possible with the freehand approach. There will be no need for an inconvenient external position sensor attached to the probe as much of the information required to calculate the probe trajectory can be inferred by matching the 3D blocks of recorded data. A miniature inertial orientation sensor will be used to guide the matching algorithms, increasing their speed and reliability. Such a sensor could eventually be incorporated in the probe housing, hence it will not be inconvenient in a clinical context.
An EPSRC project, in collaboration with the Institute of Cancer Research, Sutton, to develop three-dimensional elasticity imaging techniques using mechanically-swept 3D probes and freehand 3D ultrasound. Volumetric strain imaging provides enhanced visualisation, while measurement of 3D strain will lead to more speculative work on visualisation of more fundamental tissue mechanical properties. The people involved are Dr James Housden, Dr Andrew Gee, Dr Graham Treece and Prof Richard Prager at Engineering, plus Dr Laurence Berman, Dr Sue Freeman and Ellen Neale at Addenbrooke's Hospital, and Dr Jeff Bamber at the Institute of Cancer Research.
A Wellcome Trust technology transfer project to develop ultrasonic elasticity imaging techniques to a stage where they can be licensed to manufacturers of ultrasound equipment. The people involved are Dr Lujie Chen, Dr Andrew Gee, Dr Graham Treece and Prof Richard Prager at Engineering plus Dr Laurence Berman, Dr Sue Freeman and Ellen Neale at Addenbrooke's Hospital.
An EPSRC project to improve the clarity of ultrasound images through non-blind deconvolution using a known blurring function. Follow the link for details of our results in two- and three-dimensions, lists of publications and other related work that the project team have been involved in. The people involved are Dr Ho-Chul Shin, Henry Gomersall, Prof Richard Prager, Prof Nick Kingsbury, Dr Graham Treece and Dr Andrew Gee.
An EPSRC project to build a freehand ultrasound system which does not employ a cumbersome position sensor but is nevertheless sufficiently accurate for quantitative volume measurement work. This will necessitate working with the RF data from the ultrasound machine, not the usual B-scans. The hardware we will assemble will therefore combine RF signal processing with freehand 3D scanning, opening the way for more speculative work to improve the ultrasound image quality by processing 3D, not the usual 2D, RF data. The people involved are Peter Hassenpflug, Dr Andrew Gee, Dr Richard Prager and Dr Graham Treece at Engineering plus Dr Laurence Berman at the Department of Radiology.
Stradx and Stradwin are software systems for the acquisition and visualisation of freehand three-dimensional ultrasound using a conventional ultrasound machine and a position sensor to track the trajectory of the probe. Stradx is a mature and sophisticated system that runs under Linux. It has been freely available on the web since 1997 and was used in research labs all over the world, before being superceded by Stradwin, our second generation system that runs under Windows and Linux. Stradwin was first released on the web in November 2004 and has recently been extended to handle all sorts of medical image data, not just ultrasound. Most of the algorithms developed in our research are incorporated in these software systems. This enables them to be evaluated and used by other members of the research community. The people involved are Dr Andrew Gee, Prof Richard Prager and Dr Graham Treece.
Mitigation of imaging artifacts in 3D ultrasound.
This is a Royal Society of Engineering / EPSRC research fellowship awarded to Dr Graham Treece. The aim of the proposed research is to enable full advantage to be taken of 3D ultrasound, without danger of confusion or misdiagnosis due to imaging artifacts. The person involved is Dr Graham Treece.
Freehand 3D ultrasound to measure the volumes of breast tumours as they respond to chemotherapy.
Large tumours in the breast are sometimes treated with drugs to reduce their size before surgery is attempted. It is important to measure the way the size of the tumour changes in response to the drug treatment. This is difficult to do as more than one sweep of the ultrasound probe is often required to visualise the whole tumour. The 3D freehand system can overcome this problem and a trial of the system is underway. The people involved are Dr Graham Treece, Dr Richard Prager, Dr Andrew Gee and Peter Hassenpflug at Engineering, plus Dr Peter Britton and Dr Charlotte Coles at Addenbrooke's Hospital.
Radio Frequency Three Dimensional Ultrasound Imaging.
This is a project to build a 3D ultrasound machine that incorporates the advantages of both mechanically swept and freehand systems. It is funded by the HEFCE SRIF2 programme. The people involved are Dr Richard Prager, Dr Graham Treece and Dr Andrew Gee.
An EPSRC project to develop a system for the acquisition of exceptionally high resolution 3D ultrasound and investigate a number of promising clinical applications. This project is now complete. You can read the
final report and the
assessments by the anonymous referees. The people involved were Dr Graham Treece, Dr Richard Prager, and Dr Andrew Gee at Engineering plus Dr Charlotte Cash and Dr Laurence Berman at the Department of Radiology.
A joint project funded by the European Commission Biomedicine & Health Research Programme. This project is now complete. The people involved were Dr Jonathan Carr, Dr Richard Prager and Dr Andrew Gee at Engineering, plus Dr Kevin Dalton at the Department of Obstetrics and Gynaecology and Dr Laurance Berman at the Department of Radiology.
An EPSRC project to develop a system for the acquisition of 3D ultrasound data in a clinical environment. This project is now complete. The people involved were Patrick Gosling and Dr Richard Prager at Engineering plus Dr Laurence Berman at the Department of Radiology.
