About us
The Division of Imaging Sciences and Biomedical Engineering is a cutting-edge research and teaching division, dedicated to the development, clinical translation, and clinical application of medical imaging and computational modeling technologies.
Our objective is to facilitate research and teaching guided by clinical questions and is aimed at novelty, understanding of physiology and pathophysiology as well as development of new diagnostic tools and therapies. Basic science can, in this way, be rapidly translated into clinical applications (and vice versa).
The Division consists of five academic departments: Cardiovascular Imaging, Cancer Imaging, Imaging Chemistry & Biology, Biomedical Engineering and the Perinatal Imaging and Health. The Divisional staff and students comprise physicists, chemists, biologists, engineers, computer scientists, mathematicians and clinicians working together in a highly cross-disciplinary way. The chemists and biologists develop new contrast agents and radiopharmaceuticals for molecular imaging, the physicists and engineers develop imaging hardware and instrumentation, the computer scientists and mathematicians develop image processing and computational modelling methodologies whilst the clinicians apply them in the clinic.
The Division is highly pro-active in developing collaborations with other Departments and Divisions, both in basic sciences and clinical sciences, to widen the utility of imaging for maximum patient benefit and innovation. This has lead to a strong focus on application in cardiovascular disease and cancer. There is a close and vital relationship in our work between problem solving in clinical and biomedical application areas and methodological research in the basic disciplines.
We are working together to develop innovative applications of imaging, especially Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), X-ray, Positron Emission Tomography (PET), gamma imaging (Single Photon Emission Computed Tomography (SPECT)) and Ultrasound (US). We place high priority on rapid translation into the clinic for earliest patient benefit.
We have strong links with large imaging equipment manufacturers and the pharmaceutical industry, as well as SMEs and university start-ups developing devices and computational methods. Links with our partner NHS trusts (GSTT, KCH and SLaM) are of increasing importance to foster translational research and so improve patient care and have been greatly strengthened with the creation of King’s Health Partners, our Academic Health Sciences Centre. Translational research is not a one-way street from research to product to healthcare, but rather a network of dialogues and interactions between partners in these three sectors. Over the past 20 years we have built up a critical mass of basic science and clinical research with an outward-looking approach that engenders such dialogues in a way that would not be possible in a less integrated setting.
By providing the infrastructure and expertise for true translational research we are uniquely situated to answer questions in biology, physiology and pathophysiology, to develop new imaging techniques, contrast agents and computational models, to perform large scale clinical trials and offer resulting new techniques for clinical applications.