Label-Free Intraoperative Histological Imaging

This project is based on the scientific development of a new histological imaging technique, which will be used to minimise the sampling errors and provide a faster and more accurate intraoperative assessment of the tumour margin. Computational microscopy and image reconstruction strategies will be used to enable high-information content, label-free histological imaging using the mesolens, a giant objective lens used and developed at the University of Strathclyde. By combing an array of LED's for multimodal illumination with physics and deep learning strategies, specifically, convolution neural networks (CNN), will allow strategies for image reconstruction and analysis.

Our goal for the project is to enable high-quality diagnostic imaging of multi-mm scale tissue biopsies in under 5 minutes.

The project will be supervised by Professor Gail McConnell (University of Strathclyde), Dr Michael Shaw (NPL) and Dr Catriona Douglas (NHS).

Additionally, training is provided in many key areas for the project such as, tissue culture and cell biology, optical engineering, biomedical imaging, and computational data analysis.