The University of Birmingham has vast experience in higher education, training, research and innovation, as well as consultancy. UoB has a strong reputation in attracting EU, national, international and industrial funding. LUCA involves staff from the Optical Imaging Group at the School of Computer Science and The EPSRC funded Doctoral Training Centre in Medical Imaging. The optical imaging group at UoB has vast experience in development and utilisation of novel hyperspectral instruments and image recovery algorithms with specific applications in skin cancer, retinal imaging as well as pre‐clinical small animal imaging systems. It is involved in several national and internationally collaborative funded projects involved in the development of novel techniques for dual modality small animal imaging systems as well as functional imaging systems for the study of visual cortex within the adult brain.
Dr. Hamid Dehghani is senior lecturer in medical imaging at the University of Birmingham. His research is in the area of non-invasive imaging and measurement of physiological information from biological tissue. He has continued the development of the sotware NIRFAST for image reconstruction since it was originally developed in 2001. NIRFAST has been used extensively for several applications of NIR for functional imaging and the optical imaging group at UoB has published several high impact papers in this field. Specifically, they have shown the importance of model based image reconstruction in human brain and breast imaging which has shown a very good correlation between recovered parameters in this technique as compared to other modalities. Additionally they have demonstrated the use of subject specific models in NIR imaging and identified novel methods of incorporating these within our algorithms using models from other modalities.
Hamid Dehghani has been involved in interdisciplinary medical and optical imaging projects with biomedical optics focus for almost his entire career, and has successfully worked out commercial collaborations with industrial partners. One of the key limitations in academic and commercial translation studies in the biomedical optics world is the non‐standard use and integration of model based imaging algorithms within optical imaging. NIRFAST has shown to be the largest single software which is helping to overcome this difficulty and, within the LUCA project, Hamid Dehghani will ensure that this succeeds.
This project has received funding from the European Union‘s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 688303 and is an initiative of the Photonics Public Private Partnership.
Copyright LUCA 2016
