Academy awards 'imaging' fellowship

The projects that have been awarded research fellowships by the RAE have been selected for their potential to bring about radical innovation in their individual fields.

The fellowships are designed to provide each of the seven researchers with financial support and mentoring over a five year period as a means of enabling them to establish independent careers in research.

“Innovation is crucial to keep the UK ahead of its competitors in today’s highly competitive globalised market

RAE chairman Ric Parker

According to the RAE, each project addresses unresolved or critical issues in a specific engineering field and has the potential to lead to significant breakthroughs, benefitting both the research community and industry.

Chairman of the RAE’s research and secondments committee Ric Parker said: “Innovation is crucial to keep the UK ahead of its competitors in today’s highly competitive globalised market, and it is thanks to the work of outstanding researchers such as the recipients of this year’s Research Fellowships that the country can develop and maintain a technological advantage.”

Of the seven, one of the standout projects looks at novel imaging techniques to visualise blood flow in the brain.

Research fellow Thomas Okell, of the University of Oxford, demonstrates that non-invasive imaging techniques that show the blood flow to the brain are valuable tools, enabling doctors to make accurate diagnoses and plan interventions.

Ideally, to reduce risks to the patient to an absolute minimum, these imaging techniques should use the least possible amount of ionising radiation or contrast agents, the RAE said in a statement.

Arterial spin labelling, which Okell is attempting to perfect, is a type of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) that fulfils these requirements and can be used to produce detailed maps of the brain tissues infused by blood (perfusion), and also to perform angiography, which shows the flow of blood within arteries.

According to the RAE, current methods that use this technique for detailed angiography are time-consuming and perfusion information must be obtained in a separate scan.

With constraints on clinical scan times it is often not possible to perform both perfusion imaging and angiography in the same session, leaving the specialist with incomplete information.

As part of his research, Okell is attempting to resolve this issue, which would ultimately allow both measurements to be performed simultaneously.

Treating angiography and perfusion not as separate techniques but as different windows on a continuous process, Okell will develop the way the measurements are performed and recorded to simultaneously produce detailed results for both perfusion and angiography in a fraction of the time normally required, the RAE said.