Enduring partnership between the College and the Sir Leon Bagrit Memorial Trust marked with symposium and lecture - News
See also:
Related news stories:
Thursday 19 May 2011
By Colin Smith
Engineers are today celebrating 20 years of bioengineering teaching and research at Imperial College London and the enduring partnership that helped to make it possible.
Bioengineering is a rapidly evolving inter-disciplinary field that uses engineering techniques to solve problems in human health.
In 1991, Imperial established the Bagrit Centre, which was the forerunner to the Department of Bioengineering, with support from the Sir Leon Bagrit Memorial Trust. This Trust was founded by the late Lady Stella Bagrit in honour of her late husband, who was a leading UK engineer, and it still provides support to Imperial bioengineers through undergraduate scholarship schemes, student achievement awards and assistance for academic research.
Imperial’s Department of Bioengineering now has nearly 400 students and 76 researchers whose work ranges from understanding the brain in more detail to developing new techniques to regenerate damaged bone and tissue. Since it began 20 years ago, the department has generated more than 40 individual patents and seven spinout companies.
The video (below right) shows HRH the Princess Royal officially opening the Bagrit Centre in 1991.
This afternoon, Imperial bioengineers will hold a symposium that will reflect on 20 years of research, teaching and innovation at the College. This evening, the Department of Bioengineering will also hold the inaugural Bagrit Lecture, which will be delivered by Professor Don Ingber, a pioneer in bioengineering and Director of the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University. Click here for more details.
Professor Ross Ethier, Head of the Department of Bioengineering, says:
There are nearly 400 students studying bioengineering at Imperial.
"Bioengineering is revolutionising healthcare by providing a deeper understanding of how the body functions and creating new innovative technologies that mimic biology. However, it is only thanks to the vital support from organisations such as the Sir Leon Bagrit Memorial Trust that we have been able to make such progress in the last 20 years. We are very grateful to the Sir Leon Bagrit Memorial Trust for their continued support for academic research and student learning at Imperial."
The Department of Bioengineering has worked in partnership with the Trust over the years to help Imperial bioengineers to take their early stage research closer to commercial reality. Read (below) about some the Imperial projects that have benefitted from the Bagrit Trustees Proof of Concept Scheme.
Improving rehabilitation for stroke patients
Dr Etienne Burdet is developing prototype sensor technology that could enable stroke patients to improve their dexterity and hand/eye coordination, by playing a specially designed computer game.
The patient wears sensors on their stroke-affected hand, which are connected wirelessly to a computer. The patient must play a game of moving and picking up objects, which also have sensors attached to them.
The researchers say the technology, which is called MIMATE, could provide a more stimulating and fun alternative to current rehabilitation therapies for patients.
With MIMATE, the sensors collect information about the patient’s hand and arm movements so that doctors can assess patient performance over time. The information collected by the sensors can also be used to make changes to the game so that the therapy can be adapted to meet the evolving needs of patients.
The team have already carried out preliminary trials of MIMATE with stroke patients to test its effectiveness. They say full patient trials should begin in the next two years. The team have also done preliminary examinations to see how MIMATE could help children with cerebral palsy and people who have epileptic seizures.
New ways to image the body’s inner workings
Dr Mengxing Tang and his colleagues are augmenting ultrasound imaging technology so that it can image blood circulating around organs. He hopes that this technology could ultimately help doctors to identify the presence of disease or a tumour by revealing any areas in an organ where there is poor circulation. It could also help doctors to monitor the effectiveness of a treatment to tackle a tumour, by showing if there was any improvement in the blood flow in an organ.
One potential advantage of this method over other medical imaging techniques is that it could be done in real time, which would enable doctors to diagnose diseases more rapidly and consequently start treating a patient sooner.
To image blood flowing in organs, the researchers inject harmless microscopic gas bubbles into the organ’s blood stream. The ultrasound device emits sound waves that bounce off these bubbles, which enables the researchers to track the way that bubbles travel through an organ.
The technology is currently being trialled on animal models. Dr Tang hopes that it will be tested in human clinical trials in the next two or three of years.
Visual recognition technology based on the human eye
Dr Anil Bharath has created sophisticated surveillance vision technology that mimics the way that the brain processes visual information. It uses a video camera, which acts like an eye, and a sophisticated computer programme, which processes visual information in a similar to the way to the brain.
Dr Bharath says the advantage of the technology is that it can process large amounts of high quality visual information so that it can carry out more complex monitoring than existing technology.
The technology utilises graphic cards that are also used in gaming technology to create realistic characters and environments. This enables the computer to capture and analyse large amounts of high quality visual information with low delay between putting an image into the system and having the resu lts processed.
The Imperial researchers established the spin-out company Cortexica in 2008 to market the visual search technology, called BrandTrak, to large corporations.
In 2010, it was used by companies such as Virgin to monitor the effectiveness of their advertising campaigns during televised events. For example, BrandTrak can count and record the number of times it recognises a logo on screen and contrasts this with the number of times that a competitor’s logo appears, so that the effectiveness of a marketing campaign can be gauged.
The technology has also been augmented for use in smart phone applications, which include a wine price comparison tool.
More recently, the company has started to offer the use of its“Visual Search” technology to developers who can connect their smartphone applications to Cotexica’s visual search servers via the web, using technology called web API.
Article text (excluding photos or graphics) available under an Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike Creative Commons license.
Photos and graphics subject to third party copyright used with permission or © Imperial College London.
