| Computational Imaging | Matthew Blackledge | This studentship aims to enhance the precision of treatment with radioactive drugs in patients with late-stage cancers using advanced mathematical techniques. The student will design and validate novel Bayesian models with state-of-the-art inference tools while gaining valuable experience in a clinical cancer setting focused on impactful patient-centred research. | Mathematics, computer science and physics | Sutton |
| Therapeutic Ultrasound | Gail Ter Haar | Investigation of therapy ultrasound for treating solid tumours using transcriptomic and histological approaches. In this project, the student will investigate pancreatic cancer and neuroblastoma biomarkers for their role in the response of cancer cells to cavitation-inducing ultrasound. Physical and biological markers will be explored. These could include elasticity, immune biomarkers, and cell death biomarkers. | The project would be suitable for students with a background in Physics, Biology, Bioinformatics or Medical Sciences | Sutton |
| Targeted Therapy Molecular Oncology | Ben O’Leary | This project involves the analysis of T-cell receptor (TCR) sequencing data from head and neck squamous cell carcinoma (HNSCC) with a focus on exploring TCR diversity in the context of treatment and HPV status. The student will perform bioinformatic analysis of a cohort of patient samples and seek to explore whether TCR clones change over the course of treatment. This is a predominantly computational project, and the student will be expected to explore, analyse and communicate results. | Some experience with coding would be great, but a student from a biology course with some interest in computing, or alternatively a computer science student with interest in cancer research would be accommodated. | |
| Magnetic Resonance Imaging in Radiotherapy | Andreas Wetscherek | Optimising magnetic resonance fingerprinting post-processing for T1 and T2 mapping on a 1.5 T MR-Linac: The objective of the project is to optimise the current matching part of the magnetic resonance fingerprinting (MRF, 10.1038/nature11971) post-processing workflow. Following a review of existing methods, the student will implement and evaluate the selected methods, assess their performance in terms of processing time and accuracy of the matching on available datasets, and they will have the opportunity to acquire new datasets on the MR-Linac. | We are looking for students with a knowledge of a coding language such as MATLAB, and with good communication and organisational skills (record keeping and documentation of the work done). | Sutton |
| Ultrasound and Optical Imaging | Jeff Bamber | Computational analysis for the automated intravital localisation of 3D secularly reflecting structures such as microbubbles in tissue by applying the principles of photometric stereo to confocal reflectance microscopy". Acoustic cluster therapy (ACT) is a successful method for improving tumour response to chemotherapy by ultrasound and microbubble enhancement of drug delivery to the tumour. Further optimisation is underway using preclinical studies where individual microbubbles need to be localised so that extravasation of fluorescent drug-mimics can be studied as a function of ultrasound variables. The microbubbles can't easily be made fluorescent, but their strong optical reflectance is potentially usable if their 3D shape can be used to advantage by recognising their spherical pattern of specular reflectance using the principles of photometric stereo. This will employ reflectance microscopy using lighting from controlled directions combined with a simple ray-based model (in the first instance) to predict microbubble appearance and a computer program to be written in the project for automated detection of the resulting image signature of a microbubble. Although relatively straightforward and achievable in a summer studentship, the concept is novel and could be generalisable to detection and localisation of other specularly reflecting embedded microscopic objects. | The project would be suitable for engineers, physicists, computational scientists, or biologists if they have good computer programming (coding) skills and an interest in the physics of microscopy. | Sutton |
