Insigneo Newsletter - March 2022

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! If you would like to add information and/or events to this newsletter please email: news@insigneo.org (the newsletter will be issued during the 2nd week of the month, excluding January and August).
Please ensure that you submit news and events with a minimum of one week's notice.

Join us to celebrate 10 years of Insigneo, hear more about our new research vision and network with members, clinicans and industry representatives

Date: Friday, 8 July 2022
Venue: The Diamond Building, The University of Sheffield
Registration and abstract submission open:
The deadline for abstract submissions for the poster display is 16 May 2022.

The Insigneo Institute's Annual Showcase event, which will be held on 8 July 2022. After taking a break due to the pandemic we are excited to be able to invite you to celebrate our 10th anniversary with us at the University of Sheffield's Diamond Building.

This full day event is an opportunity for our members, funding agencies, regulatory agencies, industrial colleagues, and other academic groups in the UK to meet and see first-hand the innovative research produced by our Institute.

The day will feature:

• A keynote talk and talks from each of our five new research themes:  Biomaterials / Biomechanics / Cell engineering; Computational modelling in medicine; Biomedical imaging; Smart devices and sensors; and Healthcare data / AI;
• Early Career Researcher presentations – hear about emerging research with perspectives from the next generation of researchers;
• Poster exhibition
• Networking opportunities with industry, funders, academics and clinicians.

The day is planned as an in person event but we will continue to review government and university guidance relating to in person events.

The event is free of charge and places are available on a first come, first served basis. We invite you to register by 24 June 2022. 

Insigneo EPSRC studentship funding awarded to Dr Neil Stewart

Congratulations to Dr Neil Stewart in the Department of  Infection, Immunity and Cardiovascular Disease whose project has been awarded the Insigneo EPSRC PhD studentship.

The PhD project 'Silent MR Imaging of the breathing Lung in Neonates' is advertised below.

This project aims to develop novel “silent” free-breathing MRI methods with minimal acoustic noise, and tailored image reconstruction techniques incorporating model-based motion compensation.

New members

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

She is currently a first-year PhD student under the supervision of Professors Reilly and Claeyssens, and her project will focus on the use of a microfluidic system with a scaffold incorporated to study the crosstalk between osteoblast and macrophages in an early inflammatory phase.

Giulia completed her MSc in Bioengineering at the University of Padova (Italy) with a primary focus on neuroengineering and computational neuroscience. 

Giulia then moved to Sheffield for the Ph.D., and the main focus of her research is the human tactile sense and, in particular, the spiking activity of human tactile afferents. Overall, her project aims to improve current population spiking models of peripheral tactile responses to inform neuroprosthetics and robotics applications. By combining imaging acquisition techniques and computational methods, she investigates neural coding strategies in the tactile afferents at a population level and the propagation of tactile stimuli in deep layers of the skin to uncover how mechanical contact events drive mechanoreceptor spiking responses.

Full profile 

I am a Paramedic and an Advanced Clinical Practitioner in the Emergency Department. I joined the University of Sheffield in 2017 and have been mainly investigating flow and demand in the Urgent and Emergency care system.

I recently undertook an NIHR/HEE Clinical Doctoral Research Fellowship into risk prediction modelling of ambulance service conveyances to the Emergency Department. This used machine learning to derive and validate a new model that can predict whether a patient would have a clinical benefit if they were transported by ambulance.  

My future work aims to explore novel diagnostics and interventions that can be embedded in the urgent and emergency system to improve patient flow and care. As such, I am looking for collaborations, especially from industry partners in the area of point of care diagnostics.  Please contact me at: j.miles@sheffield.ac.uk

Full profile 

Invitation to submit papers to the MICCAI Workshop on Computational Biomechanics for Medicine (CBM) XVII

We would like to invite paper submission to the MICCAI Workshop on Computational Biomechanics for Medicine (CBM) XVII, to be held in Singapore this autumn. MICCAI is a well-established conference on medical image computing and computer assisted intervention. The CBM workshop has been running successfully as part of the conference for the past 16 years. The MICCAI CBM workshop provides an opportunity for computational biomechanics specialists to present and exchange opinions on the opportunities of applying their techniques to computer-integrated medicine. The goal of the workshop is to showcase the clinical and scientific utility of computational biomechanics in computer-integrated medicine.

We call for papers in the following areas of application of computational biomechanics and continuum modelling:

• medical image analysis;
• image-guided surgery;
• surgical simulation;
• surgical intervention planning;
• surgical technique development;
• disease prognosis and diagnosis;
• injury mechanism analysis;
• surgical aid design;
• digital twins and artificial organs;
• implant and prosthesis design;
• medical robotics;
• tissue engineering;
• embryonic development;
• mechanics of ageing;
• generation of synthetic training data for AI systems.

The paper submission deadline is in June. We will select 6-8 oral presentations alongside 2 invited keynote lectures. Each manuscript submitted to the workshop is assessed by at least two external reviewers. Accepted papers will be published in a dedicated book published by Springer, as a dedicated volume of the Computational Biomechanics for Medicine book series.

This is an excellent opportunity for early career researchers to publish their work, as well as getting a chance to present their findings in an established international conference.

Insigneo member Dr Xinshan Li is part of the workshop organisation team, and will be happy to answer any questions you have. Contact: xinshan.li@sheffield.ac.uk

PhD success

We'd like to say a big congratulations to the following PhD students who have recently passed their vivas:

• Marco Sensale (SPINNER ESR)
• Claude Fiifi Hayford 
• Adrian Elias

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

ESMC 2022 Women in STEM award 

Congratulations to Fiona Gibson who has won a Women in STEM award to attend the European Solid Mechanics Conference in July 2022.  Fiona is studying for her PhD on ‘’Investigating Spinal Biomechanics in Multiple Myeloma patients for the Reduction of Surgical Intervention’’ with Dr Stefaan Verbruggen at the University of Sheffield in the Department of Mechanical Engineering.

Sensors: Most Notable Articles (December 2021–February 2022)

Congratulations to Kirsty Scott whose article 'A Quality Control Check to Ensure Comparability of Stereophotogrammetric Data between Sessions and Systems' has been recognised as one of Sensors most notable articles (December 2021 - February 2022). Kirsty Scott is a PhD student with scholarship funded by Grunenthal aiming to support the Mobilise-D project TVS, under the supervision of Professor Claudia Mazzà at the University of Sheffield in the Department of Mechanical Engineering.

MultiSim research: Personalised 3D Assessment of Trochanteric Soft Tissues Improves Hip Fracture Classification Accuracy

Multisim researchers have had a paper published in the Annals of Biomedical Engineering on 'Personalised 3D Assessment of Trochanteric Soft Tissues Improves Hip Fracture Classification Accuracy'.

They found that soft tissue geometry estimated using BMI was a significant underestimate of personalised and orientation-specific measures of tissue geometry. When the latter were used, fracture classification accuracy improved compared to the state-of-the-art. The improvement was smaller when orientation-specificity was suppressed and there was no improvement whatsoever when personalisation was suppressed instead. The results of this study suggest that clinical pipelines should focus on measuring soft tissue geometry in a person specific manner, and technologies that improve three-dimensional characterisation need not be prioritised.

Sheffield NIHR Clinical Research Facility (CRF) awarded £7.9m to continue cutting edge medical research

A clinical research facility run by the University of Sheffield and Sheffield Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust has been awarded £7.9m in funding which will support the development and testing of new treatments for diseases, many of which currently have no cure.

The funding, announced by the National Institute for Health Research this week (28 February 2022), has been awarded to the Sheffield NIHR Clinical Research Facility (CRF) based at Sheffield Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust and run in partnership with the University of Sheffield.

International Women's Day 2022

This month marked International Women's Day (8 March).  We are very proud of our diverse and inclusive research community and celebrate the achievements of our female staff and students. Head over to Women in Engineering's Wall of Women which features inspirational women from across the Faculty of Engineering including a number of Insigneo members and alumni.

Also highlighted on International Women's Day was Freddie Garland's continuing project ‘Women’s Movement 100: Angels of the North’.  Freddie, a dancer and choreographer, collaboarated with Claudia Mazzà and the MultiSim project, and Professor Julie Gottlieb from the Department of History to create a filmed performance about women’s suffrage, emancipation and health for 2020's Festival of the Mind.  This work was featured on The University of Sheffield Player.

Guest Lectures, Conferences & Seminars

Insigneo events

18 March
Insigneo Seminar: Applications of biomechanics and modeling in personalized medicine

31 March
Insigneo research theme workshop: Computational Medicine (14:30 - 16:00)

26 April
Insigneo research theme workshop: Biomedical Imaging (11:00 - 12:30)

24 May
Insigneo research theme workshop: Healthcare data  (11:00 - 12:30)

23 June
Insigneo research theme workshop: Biomaterials/Biomechanics/Cell engineering (14:30 - 16:00)

8 July
Insigneo Showcase - abstract submissions are open

20 September
Insigneo research theme workshop: Smart devices (10:30 - 12:00)

18 October
Insigneo research theme workshop: Computational Medicine (10:30 - 12:00)

22 November
Insigneo research theme workshop: Biomedical Imaging (11:00 - 12:30)

20 December
Insigneo research theme workshop: Healthcare data/AI (11:00 - 12:30)

Other events

17 March
RSE Lunchbytes: Software engineering in High Energy / Particle Physics

18 March
10:00 IICD, Department Research in Progress Meeting – Sheila Francis group - Aya Elwazir 'circANRIL16-5 regulates atherosclerosis through binding to cell cycle regulator TRA2B', Rothman group - Hamza Zafar 'The effects of acute and chronic heart failure on subcutaneous interstitial pressure' Please contact Sarah Black (sarah.black@sheffield.ac.uk) to arrange access.

21 March
HELSI Bites: Bilingualism and the brain: can learning a language boost memory across the lifespan?

25 March
10:00 IICD, Department Research in Progress Meeting – Rebecca Gosling 'Comprehensive modelling of myocardial ischaemic burden', Ebony Gunwhy 'Quantification of organ motion during prolonged breath-holding using deformable image registration' Please contact Sarah Black (sarah.black@sheffield.ac.uk) to arrange access.

25 March
11th Annual Mellanby Centre Research Day

28 March - 1 April
N8 CIR: Digital Research Infrastructure Skills Retreat

1 April
10:00 IICD, Department Research in Progress Meeting – Faith Tolliday (Title TBC), Esra Amoura (Title TBC) Please contact Sarah Black (sarah.black@sheffield.ac.uk) to arrange access.

8 April
10:00 IICD, Department Research in Progress Meeting – Abdulkhaleg Alfaify 'Investigation of New Type III Secretion System Protein Effectors of Aeromonas veronii', Thushan de Silva (Title TBC) Please contact Sarah Black (sarah.black@sheffield.ac.uk) to arrange access.

22 April
10:00 IICD, Department Research in Progress Meeting – Salman Almalki (Title TBC), Alberto Marzo (Title TBC) Please contact Sarah Black (sarah.black@sheffield.ac.uk) to arrange access.

23 - 27 May
VPH Institute -  6th Summer School: Models & Simulations for highly multifactorial disorders

26 - 29 June 
27th Congress of the European Society of Biomechanics in Porto, Portugal

6 - 8 July
BRS22 - abstract deadline 7 March 2022

10 - 14 July
9th World Congress of Biomechanics (WCB 2022)

5 September
RSE Conference 2022, Newcastle

6 - 9 September
VPH2022 Conference:  Digital twins for personalised treatment development and clinical trials - abstract deadline 18 March 2022

8 - 9 September 
BioMedEng22, UCL

21 - 23 October
Brainhack Krakow 2022 – the satellite event of the Neuronus Forum 2022

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

Vacancies

PhD Opportunity: Silent MR Imaging of the breathing Lung in Neonates
(closing date: 1 April 2022)

Publications 

Research output affiliated to Insigneo in Scopus (please ensure papers are affiliated to the Insigneo Institute by including the words "Insigneo Institute for in silico Medicine"):

Personalised 3D Assessment of Trochanteric Soft Tissues Improves HIP Fracture Classification Accuracy (Annals of Biomedical Engineering) A. Aldieri, M. Terzini, A. L. Audenino, C. Bignardi, M. Paggiosi, R. Eastell, M. Viceconti, P. Bhattacharya

Cardiovascular examination using hand-held cardiac ultrasound (Journal of Echocardiography) S. Jenkins, M. G. Shiha, E. Yones, J. Wardley, A. Ryding, C. Sawh, M. Flather, P. Morris, A. J. Swift, V. S. Vassiliou, P. Garg

Geroprotectors and Skeletal Health: Beyond the Headlines (Frontiers in Cell and Developmental Biology) A. Rayson, M. Boudiffa, M. Naveed, J. Griffin, E. Dall’Ara, I. Bellantuono

Zebrafish vascular quantification: A tool for quantification of three-dimensional zebrafish cerebrovascular architecture by automated image analysis (Development (Cambridge)) E. C. Kugler, J. Frost, V. Silva, K. Plant, K. Chhabria, T. J. A. Chico, P. A. Armitage

Characterization of persistent atrial fibrillation with non-contact charge density mapping and relationship to voltage (Journal of Arrhythmia) J. M. S. Lee T. A. Nelson, R. H. Clayton, N. F. Kelland

Hyperpolarized 129Xe imaging of the brain: Achievements and future challenges (Magnetic Resonance in Medicine) Y. Shepelytskyi, V. Grynko, M. R. Rao,T. Li, M. Agostino, J. M. Wild, M. S. Albert