Dear Colleagues,

The new Division for Imaging & Technology (DIT) is to be build up by Luc Bidaut and Andreas Melzer as co-Heads and has just been established.

Over the past couple of months, IMSaT (now a part of DIT) has had some notable events and success stories, which are further detailed in the following.

News
The planned ERDF match funded extension of the IMSaT MRI unit at Wilson House will be built in the next few months to incorporate short term Thiel embalmed cadaver storage for preparation of refunctionalisation, perfusion and respiratory motion.

Sandy Cochran’s Ultrasound Technology group will move out of Wilson House and occupy Corridor C, at Level 6 adjacent to the CRC, They will continue there their exciting research on high frequency high resolution ultrasound devices for diagnosis and multimodality approaches for therapy.

Since IMSaT was awarded as General Electrics (GE) first European Centre of Excellence for MRI guided interventions in surgery, we have made significant progress in developing new interventional MRI guided procedures and as a result the first four patients have been treated under MRI guidance at our collaboration partner Sheba Medical Centre in Tel Aviv, Israel on the 14th of November.

The Chinese GE group has now initiated the first Sino-European Centre of Excellence for MRI guided interventions and surgery, and Andreas was invited to hold keynote lectures at the Chinese Neurosurgery Conference and at the annual meeting on Minimally Invasive Neurosurgery in Beijing on October 14 and 15. During that same visit, a first Memorandum of Understanding was signed with the Cancer Hospital and the General Hospital of Tianjin Medical University, to establish the new Centre. We have already a long-term collaboration with Tianjin Medical University for the joint masters programmes on biomedical engineering and medical imaging led by Zhihong Huang (EPM).

Meetings
At the 23rd SMIT Interventional Conference on Sept 13-14, 2011 in Tel Aviv, one of our many talented PhD students - DouDou Xu - was awarded the SMIT Advanced Technology award for her work on targeted drug delivery. This nicely aligns with the 1st Poster Price given to the PhD student Björn Gerold at SMIT 2010 for "Cavitation in Therapeutic Ultrasound".

Björn Gerold, Paul Prentice et al. got their paper on "Directed jetting from collapsing cavities exposed to focused ultrasound" accepted by Applied Physics Letters.

We have been invited to present our research at the first European Symposium on focussed ultrasound on Sept 21-22 Sept in Rome where Andreas gave the "New Horizon Lecture". In addition, he was elected to organize the second European Symposium on Focussed Ultrasound in 2013 and also to co-chair the new European working group on focussed ultrasound, which will have its kick off meeting on Feb 10, 2012 in Rome.

The ground breaking work on Thiel embalmed cadavers, (funded by MRC DPSF) and MRI guided interventions, was presented by the two PhD students Erwin Immel and Martin Rube at the RSNA (Radiological Society of North America; the largest radiology meeting with ~ 60,000 attendees) on Nov 26-Dec 2, 2011

On Jan 20, 2012 Dr Graeme MacLeod was awarded the prize for "Innovation in Anaesthesia and Critical Care" by the Association of Anesthetists for his work with the Ultrasound team and Medical Physics.

Many of our students have attended other international conferences and presented their work on ultrasound, image-guided procedure work flow, MRI guided focussed ultrasound, FUS mediated targeted drug delivery and laser induced cavitation, surgical technology and bionanotechnology.

We have also been invited to hold seminars at various international leading image guided therapy centres such as the BWH of Harvard Medical School in Boston, the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York, the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, the University of Mississippi Jackson, and the University of Toronto, with the purpose of collaboration and translation of IMSaT research into clinical practice.

Last but not least, congratulations to Sir Alfred Cuschieri who has recently started his advanced grant from the European Research Council on a robotic intestinal capsule CODIR. The work is currently being established at IMSaT and will occupy the former space of the ultrasound group.