Insigneo Newsletter - September 2024

Welcome to our monthly Insigneo newsletter!  

Our monthly e-newsletter keeps you up to date with events, funding, success stories and information. We hope you will find it useful! 

South Yorkshire Digital Health Hub announces £500k to fund projects from first cohort

Our South Yorkshire Digital Health Hub is thrilled to announce that, a year after its launch, the Hub will support innovative projects from its first cohort of applications with almost half a million pounds of seed funding.

The Hub's first funding call attracted a diverse range of applications from across South Yorkshire. The review panel was impressed by the quality of the proposals, with many applicants successfully incorporating the training provided by the Hub on structuring pitches and creating impactful applications. This led to an exceptionally strong first round of applications.

New ‘Tasty Spoon’™ will enhance food flavours for people living with dementia

Insigneo Research Theme Director for smart devices and sensors, David King, is a Co-Investigator on a project developing a breakthrough technological aid which uses electrostimulation to enhance food flavours for people living with dementia.

Soft robots given resilience boost by University of Sheffield engineers

A new type of valve that makes soft robots more resilient to damage has been developed by Dr Marco Pontin and Insigneo Research Theme Director for smart devices and sensors, Dr Dana Damian from the University of Sheffield.

Insigneo Institute hosts BORS 2024 Annual Meeting at the University of Sheffield

The British Orthopaedic Research Society Annual Meeting 2024 was hosted by the Insigneo Institute and the School of Mechanical, Aerospace and Civil Engineering at the University of Sheffield on 9 - 10 September.

The event, chaired by Professor Claire Brockett, was attended by over 100 delegates who gathered to hear about research being carried out by BORS members across the themes of: Clinical Biomechanics, Mechanobiology, Clinical studies, Biomechanical modelling, Disease pathobiology, and Therapeutics.

Professor Ashley Blom, Vice-President and Head of the Faculty of Health welcomed delegates to the event and highlighted the importance of the society in bringing together researchers across science, engineering and clinical disciplines to deliver collaborative and translational research in orthopaedics.

Festival of the Mind returns to Sheffield

Festival of the Mind is back with a bang this September!

The University of Sheffield’s flagship public engagement festival returns with its most ambitious and exciting programme yet.

This year, Festival of Mind will host over 40 FREE in-person events across the city centre. Our world-leading researchers join forces with local creatives to bring pioneering research to life through immersive exhibitions, films, live performances and much more.

“We want to ignite curiosity in current and future generations, demonstrating the profound impact that University research has on all of our lives, locally, nationally, and globally,” Professor Vanessa, Director of City, Culture and Public Engagement.

Full details:  https://bit.ly/4dH45CR

Check out these events from our Insigneo members:

Origami Transformer
Dates: 19 - 29 September
Opening times: Tuesday–Saturday: 10am–5pm (closed Mondays) Sunday: 11am–4pm
Location: Futurecade, Millennium Gallery

Dr Shuhei Miyashita and artist Seiko Kinoshita have created a captivating display of origami engineering and art. Witness large, dynamic sculptures undergoing stunning transformations, merging traditional origami craft with modern technology. Experience an extraordinary fusion of art and robotics, showcasing creations unlike anything found in standard university or museum exhibits.

Ageing = Frailty?
Date: Sunday 22nd September
Time: 4pm
Location: Barker’s Pool, Sheffield, S1 4FT (See the full exhibit at the Persistence Works)

What is frailty, and is it an inevitable part of ageing? Is it all bad, or is there beauty to be found? Explore and challenge the concept of frailty as visualised by artist Seiko Kinoshita. The work is inspired by research by Professor Ilaria Bellantuono and the Healthy Lifespan Institute, informed by the real experiences of people in our community.

Cor_alis _ChoraIis: Exploring Trust in Artificial Intelligence in Diagnostic Medicine
Date: Sunday 29th September
Time: 2pm
Location: Barker’s Pool, Sheffield, S1 4FT

This choral piece performed by Kantos Chamber Choir, Cor_alis _ChoraIis, employs the voice to explore trust in Artificial Intelligence in medicine. A collaboration between Professor Andy Swift, Sheffield Medical School, artists Dr Emma O’Connor and Dr Michael Day and composer Michael Betteridge, Cor_alis _ChoraIis is constructed from expert interview transcripts.

Avicenna Alliance webinars now open to non-members

The Avicenna Monthly Members' Only Webinars are now open to non-members!

Join our sessions to dive into cutting-edge topics, connect with a broader community, and be part of discussions that were previously exclusive to members.

Don’t miss this opportunity to learn, connect, and make a greater impact!

Share this fantastic news with your contacts and invite them to attend. Everyone is welcome!

More information: https://www.avicenna-alliance.com/webinars.html

The next webinar taking place is:

• Tuesday, 8 October 2024 - "From the Virtual Metabolic Human to Digital Metabolic Twins" by Cyrille Thinnes from NUI Galway - REGISTRATION

Insigneo Early Career Researcher community

Our Early Career Researcher ECR group is open to all Insigneo Members who are PhD students, postdocs, fellows, lecturers and those who self-define as an ECR.

Find out more and join

New ECR Committee Member 

We'd like welcome our new ECR committee member, Dr Malwina Matella, Research Associate in Computational Modelling of Electrical Impedance Spectroscopy in Oral Tissues from the School of Computer Science. We'd also like to thank Dr Ivan Benemerito, who has been instrumental in setting up the Insigneo ECR group, as he steps down from the committee. 

Insigneo ECR Committee

Conferences

BioMedEng24

Insigneo members Professors Enrico Dall'Ara, Sanja Dogramadzi and Christine Le Maitre gave keynote lectures at the BioMedEng24 Conference which took place 5 - 6 September at Queen Mary University of London.

• Enrico Dall'Ara from the School of Medicine and Population Health gave a key note lecture on 'Biomechanical properties of human metastaticvertebrae: a combined experimental and computational approach' and was co-chair of the in silico modelling session.
• Sanja Dogramadzi from the School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering,  gave a key note lecture on 'Robot-Assisted fracture surgery and Computer assisted diagnostics' and co-chaired the Medical robotics and devices session.
• Christine Le Maitre from the School of Medicine and Population Health gave a key note lecture on 'Restoring the biomechanics of the intervertebraldisc induces regeneration' and co-chaired the Tissue Engineering session.

Insigneo members Professor Gwen Reilly and Dr Vanessa Hearnden both chaired sessions and several Insigneo PhD students and PDRA presented posters: 

• Suzanna Coldman - Segmentation of the placenta from MRI for investigating placental abnormalities - best poster award.
• Saira Farage-O'Reilly - Relationship between the mouse cortical thickness and its failure load evaluated along different loading directions
• Fiona Gibson - Mechanobiological model of bone adaption in vertebrae of individual multiple myeloma patients  

VPH2024

The VPH Conference 2024 took place 4-6 September 2024 at the University of Stuttgart and was attended by many Insigneo members.  The following Insigneo members gave presentations at the event:

• Ning Wang, School of Mechanical, Aerospace and Civil Engineering - Predictive modelling of renal circulation hemodynamic outcomes in hypertensive and diabetic kidney disease
• Dr Malwina Matella, School of Computer Science - Virtual tissue constructs to assess the potential of electrical impedance spectroscopy as a method for tissue identification and pathology diagnosis
• Magdelena Otta, School of Medicine and Population Health - 3D model of the iliac vein unification – Sensitivity analysis
• Frederik Trommer, School of Mechanical, Aerospace and Civil Engineering - Code verification of contact analysis using a micro-finite-element solver
• Dr Ivan Benemerito, School of Mechanical, Aerospace and Civil Engineering - Use of shape analysis and computational fluid dynamics for identification of factors relevant for aneurysm rupture
• Professor Damien Lacroix, School of Mechanical, Aerospace and Civil Engineering - Development of a computational inflammation model of osteoarthritis including obesity
• Dr Daniele Tartarini, School of Computer Science - AI-CARE: Digital twin for cancer research

British and Irish Chapter of the ISMRM

The Britsh & Irish Chapter of the International Society for Magnetic Resonance in Medicine (ISMRM) held their annual conference on 11 - 13 September at the University of Nottingham.  Insigneo Executive Director, Professor Jim Wild from the School of Medicine and Population Health, gave an invited lecture on 'How to: measure with hyperpolarised gases' and Amy Simmons gave a proffered talk on 'Quantification of gas trapping in cystic fibrosis using residual volume (RV) lung 1H-MRI'. 

Several Insigneo members presented posters: 

• Jemima Pilgrim-Morris - Mapping the amplitude and phase of dissolved 129Xe red blood cell signal oscillations with keyhole spectroscopic lung imaging.
• Steven Reynolds - Towards phase contrast MRI of stratified multiphase flows: a probe for rheology under combined shear and extension.  
• Steven Reynolds - Investigating live human sperm metabolism during hyperactivation and the acrosome reaction using 13C-NMR.
• Joao Periquito - Monitoring diabetic kidney disease progression with DTI and tractography.

Professor Claire Brockett gives keynote lecture at Bath Biomechanics Symposium

Insigneo member, Professor Claire Brockett from the School of Mechanical, Aerospace and Civil Engineering, gave a keynote lecture on  'An engineering approach to optimising surgical technique for osteochondral defect repair in the ankle' at the 16th Bath Biomechanics Symposium on 6 September 2024.

ERS Congress 2024

Insigneo member,  Dr Helen Marshall from the School of Medicine and Population Health presented on 'Imaging lung perfusion in interstitial lung diseases' at the European Respiratory Society (ERS) Congress on 9 September 2024.

The ERS is the largest scientific and clinical organisation in respiratory medicine in Europe. Their members are scientists, clinicians, allied healthcare professionals and other experts from around the world.

2024 BBS Biennial Meeting

The British Biophysical Society Biennial Meeting 2024 was held at the Bay Campus of University of Swansea on 11-13 September, 2024.

Insigneo Research Theme Director for Imaging Life, Dr Alice Pyne from School of Chemical, Materials and Biological Engineering gave a talk on 'Tackling topology at the interface of Physics and Biology' and co-chaired the session on Physics for Life Roadmap.

Insigneo member Laura Wiggins (pictured above) also gave a talk at the event on  'Quantifying the hidden interactions of our genome through atomic force microscopy and machine learning'.

Congratulations to Insigneo member Dr Frederik Trommer for passing his viva with minor corrections! 

Congratulations also to Insigneo member Suzanna Coldman (PhD student supervised by Dr Xinshan Li) who won a best poster award at BioMedEng24.

BORS 2024 Awards 

Congratulations to Insigneo members Professor Christine Le Maitre (above) who won best podium award and  Saira Farage-O-Reilly (below) who won best poster award.

We would like to introduce some of our new members who have joined the Insigneo Institute recently. 

Find out more about Insigneo membership and our members here: https://www.sheffield.ac.uk/insigneo/membership 

My work here focuses on developing soft resilient structures/robots designed for medical applications. Prior to this, I completed my PhD in Medical Robotics at the Storm Lab, University of Leeds, where I investigated novel designs of miniaturized surgical tools utilizing soft magnetically actuated robots (also known as magnetic tentacles). My research aimed to reduce the invasiveness of endoscopic procedures and enable access to previously unreachable areas of the body for diagnosis and treatment. I collaborated closely with clinicians to ensure our work was aligned with current clinical needs, resulting in several peer-reviewed publications and patents by the end of my PhD.

My research interests include: soft robotics for medical applications, micro-fabrication, micro-robotics, bio-inspired structures and mechanisms, mechanisms for drug delivery.

In March earlier this year I have started a postdoc position with Dr Dawn Walker, we work on computational models relating to the electrical properties of oral tissues in health and pathology. Together in the YCR grant group we work towards developing tissue engineered oral mucosa and virtual tissue constructs to support non-invasive diagnosis of oral tissue cancer using electrical impedance spectroscopy.

In my free time I enjoy all sorts of hobbies, from music and art to literature and sports, I am always down to discuss interesting (or really really bad) books!

Prior to my PhD studies I completed my MSc in Business Analytics at the University of Geneva, Switzerland, and a year as an intern in Business Intelligence at a private Swiss hospital.

The goal of my research project is to develop a machine learning algorithm using existing sleep study data from Great Ormond Street Hospital (GOSH) and Sheffield Children’s Hospital (SCH) to identify the optimal individual or combination of respiratory parameters to diagnose and stratify the severity of Sleep Disordered Breathing (SDB) in children with and without comorbidities.

Her work focuses on understanding how people interact with AI systems in the process of interpreting data and then acquiring information, and how this interaction augments the user experience and influences decision-making.  She specialises in using methods from Data Visualization, Machine Learning, HCI to create innovative methodologies and guide interface design, addressing challenges in areas such as healthcare and human mobility.

She was a research associate at the UCL Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (UCL CASA). She completed a PhD in Information Retrieval at the University of Sheffield.

Full profile

Do you have news to share with us?

If you would like us to include information and/or events to this newsletter please email: info@insigneo.org (the newsletter will be issued during the 2nd week of the month, excluding January and August). 

Insigneo members - please let us know when your students are graduating so that we can celebrate their success!

Please ensure that you submit items for inclusion with a minimum of one week's notice.

Guest Lectures, Conferences & Seminars

We will share a link to our Online Training Opportunities document here each month.

Insigneo events

Week commencing 16 September
Sano training on computational medicine

There will be an opportunity for Insigneo members to join seminars and workshops on various aspects of computational medicine that are taking place during the week commencing  16  September while the Insigneo Institute hosts 1st and 2nd year PhD students from the Sano Centre for Computational Medicine (Krakow, Poland).   Sessions open to Insigneo members will include:

• Introduction to VR 
• Exascale computing  
• Uncertainty quantification
• Governance and ethical use of data
• Using medical data: challenges and opportunities
• Regulatory aspects
• Model verification, validation and ASME VV40

25 September
Joint POLARIS/Insigneo Seminar: New horizons in hyperpolarized MRI

2 October
Insigneo Seminar: Combining mathematical modelling, machine learning and imaging for understanding disease progression

24 October
Insigneo Seminar: Spatial mechano-transcriptomics of mouse embryogenesis

28 November
Insigneo Horizon Europe event - save the date!

11 December
Insigneo General Assembly - save the date!

A selection of Insigneo seminar recordings are available to view on our YouTube channel.

Other events

16 September
Advantages of Hybrid PET/MR for Imaging Brain Function (Keith St Lawrence
Professor, Medical Biophysics, Western University)

21 September
GASOC Frugal Innovation Skills Course – Global Virtual Hackathon: AI and Digital Tech for Global Surgery

4 October
Sheffield Robotics Seminar: Mastering the Hands in Embodied AI and Humanoid Robotics: Challenges and Potentials

8 October
 Avicenna Alliance Webinar: "From the Virtual Metabolic Human to Digital Metabolic Twins" by Cyrille Thinnes from NUI Galway

17 October
South Yorkshire Digital Health Hub Annual Plenary - save the date!

2025

24-25 March
Physics of Life conference  - save the date!

11 - 12 June
4th Child Health Technology (CHT) Conference, online 

For a full list of upcoming events visit: https://www.sheffield.ac.uk/insigneo/overview/events

Publications

Large-scale cultivation of Synechocystis sp. PCC6803 for the production of Poly(3-hydroxybutyrate) and its potential applications in the manufacturing of bulk and medical prototypes (New Biotechnology) E. Elghazy, S. Mohammad, D. S. Mohamed, K. Wianglor, S. Tetali, M. Raut, I. Roy, J. Pandhal

A novel pipeline employing deep multi-attention channels network for the autonomous detection of metastasizing cells through fluorescence microscopy (Computers in Biology and Medicine) M. Mamalakis, S. C. Macfarlane, S. V. Notley, 
A. K. B. Gad, G. Panoutsos 

Texture perception at the foot sole: comparison between walking, sitting, and to the hand (Journal of Neurophysiology) L. D. Cleland, M. Rupani, C. R. Blaise, T. J. Ellmers, H. P. Saal

Applications of artificial intelligence in computed tomography imaging for phenotyping pulmonary hypertension (Current Opinion in Pulmonary Medicine) M. J. Sharkey, E. W. Checkley, A. J. Swift

Data-driven image mechanics (D2IM): A deep learning approach to predict displacement and strain fields from undeformed X-ray tomography images – Evaluation of bone mechanics (Extreme Mechanics Letters) P. Soar, M. Palanca, E. Dall’Ara, G. Tozzi

An agent-based model for cell microenvironment simulation using FLAMEGPU2 (Computers in Biology and Medicine) C. Borau, R. Chisholm, P. Richmond, D. Walker

Feeder-free culture of human pluripotent stem cells drives MDM4-mediated gain of chromosome 1q (Stem Cell Reports) D. Stavish, C. J. Price, G. Gelezauskaite, H. Alsehli, K. A. Leonhard, S. M. Taapken, E. M. McIntire, O. Laing, B. M. James, J. J. Riley, J. Zerbib, D. Baker, A. L. Harding, L. H. Jestice, T. F. Eleveld, A. J. M. Gillis, S. Hillenius, L. H. J. Looijenga, P. J. Gokhale, U. Ben-David, T. E. Ludwig, I. Barbaric

3D Melt-Extrusion Printing of Medium Chain Length Polyhydroxyalkanoates and Their Application as Antibiotic-Free Antibacterial Scaffolds for Bone Regeneration (ACS Biomaterials Science and Engineering) E. Marcello, R. Nigmatullin, P. Basnett, M. Maqbool, M. A. Prieto, J. C. Knowles, A. R. Boccaccini, I. Roy

Development of a New Prototype Paediatric Central Sleep Apnoea Monitor (Technologies) R. Saatchi, H. Elphick, J. Rowson, M. Wesseler, J. Marris, S. Shortland, L.Thomas

Multimodal soft valve enables physical responsiveness for preemptive resilience of soft robots (Science Robotics) M. Pontin, D. D. Damian 

Observable Atrial and Ventricular Fibrillation Episode Durations Are Conformant With a Power Law Based on System Size and Spatial Synchronization (Circulation: Arrhythmia and Electrophysiology) D. Dharmaprani, K. Tiver, S. S. Shahrbabaki, E. V. Jenkins, D. Chapman, C. Strong, J. X. Quah, L. O’Loughlin, L. Mitchell, M. Tung, W. Ahmad, N. Stoyanov, M. Aguilar, S. A. Niederer, C. H. Roney, M. P. Nash, R. H. Clayton, S. Nattel, A. N. Ganesan

Convergence, sampling and total order estimator effects on parameter orthogonality in global sensitivity analysis (PLoS Computational Biology) H. Saxton, X. Xu, T. Schenkel, R. H. Clayton, I. Halliday

Association of risk assessment at diagnosis with healthcare resource utilization and health-related quality of life outcomes in pulmonary arterial hypertension (Pulmonary Circulation) A. Lawrie, N. Hamilton, S. Wood, F. Exposto, R. Muzwidzwa, L. Raiteri, A. Beaudet, A. Muller, R. Sauter, N. Pillai, D. G. Kiely, ASPIRE Consortium

Bone remodelling prediction using mechanical stimulus with bone connectivity theory in porous implant (Journal of the Mechanical Behavior of Biomedical Materials) Z. Zou, V. S. Cheong, P. Fromme