Theme lead: Prof Tofail Syed

The group will leverage its current expertise and infrastructure in real-time chemical imaging and microscopy towards a better understanding of molecular and cellular processes of development and growth of cancer at multiple stages. To this extent the group endeavours in developing tools, techniques, and methodologies for imaging with greatly increased speed, penetration, spatial and temporal resolution, sensitivity, specificity and depth of focus. Real-time data handling, image processing, and automatic decision making is another cornerstone of imaging for cancer diagnosis and therapy. Our activity will involve imaging cancer screening, discovery, diagnosis, and treatment.in both research and clinical settings. As such, it will include clinical imaging in radiology, pathology, endoscopy, and nuclear medicine, experimental molecular imaging in humans and small animals, research on new contrast agents in CT, MRI, ultrasound, and nanomedicine for theranostics, new techniques and applications of image processing, pattern recognition and automatic decision making towards personalized screening, diagnosis, therapy, monitoring and follow up. We will bring new and robust solutions to improve the standardization of quantitative imaging and image-guided interventions for the diagnosis and treatment of cancer.  The five key objectives of our activities are:

  • Molecular and Cellular Imaging to understand the disease process, early diagnosis, effective intervention
  • Nanomedicine for Fast, Better Contrast Cancer Imaging and Combinatorial Therapy
  • Image Processing, Classification, Phenotyping
  • Automatic Decision-Making, Early Intervention, and Drive Towards Zero Recurrence
  • Clinical Convergence, Translation, (Re)training, Commercialisation

The activity of this group originate from 2 European Commission FP7 projects LANIR (20012-2015) and BioElectricSurface (2008-2011) led by Professor Tofail Syed, Science Foundation Ireland (SFI) Consolidator Development Award on Nonlinear optical micro-spectroscopy for multiplex suspension immunoassay (2014-2018) and TIDA on Nondestructive Chemical Imaging for 10 nm node transistors (2014-2015) led by Dr. Christophe Silien, SFI Centre for Medical Device CURAM funded Platform and Targeted projects on Imaging and Image assisted therapy (2015-2020) led by Prof. Tofail Syed and multiple direct and co-funded industry projects jointly conducted by Professor Tofail and Dr. Silien in collaboration with Professor Tewfik Soulimane.

The group has a long and rich collaboration history with industry including biomedical device manufacturer such as COOK Medical. The group has also promoted 3 companies including Mica Nano Technology Ltd., which is active in the field of infection control and personal protection. The objectives set for the team is of high industrial significance especially in rapid and early stage diagnosis of cancer, image guided therapy and theranostics.