A consortium of four academic and clinical institutes has won an international grant for a research project on novel multiplex prognostic biomarkers for colorectal cancer via computerised analysis of multi-protein fluorescence images. The research project led by Dr Nasir Rajpoot has been awarded the total amount of $1.05m by the Qatar Foundation. The consortium involves academic and clinical partners based in the UK and Qatar. The research team at Warwick will be composed of two new researchers and key investigators in Dr Nasir Rajpoot (Computer Science), Dr Mike Khan (Life Sciences), Prof David Epstein (Mathematics), and Dr Rich Savage (Systems Biology).

A fully funded PhD studentship is available in the Computational Biology & Bioimaging (COMBI) research group under the supervision of Dr Nasir Rajpoot (Computer Science) and Prof Ian Cree (Warwick Medical School). The PhD research project, jointly funded by EPSRC and GE Healthcare, is titled Computer-Assisted Assessment of Digital Pathology Slides and is concerned with developing algorithms for modelling and analysis of morphological patterns in multi-gigapixel microscopic images of human tissue with applications to computer-assisted assessment and grading of digital pathology images. Part of the research may involve extending a patent-pending technology to a real-world clinical setting. The project is partly funded by GE Healthcare, the largest manufacturer of medical imaging devices worldwide, and will involve active collaboration with Dr David Snead, Head of Pathology at the University Hospitals Coventry & Warwickshire (UHCW) and GE Omnyx teams at UHCW and in Pittsburgh, USA.

Dr Rajpoot gave a keynote speech titled Image Computing for Life Sciences at the International Conference on Machine Vision (ICMV'2010) held in Islamabad during December 29-31, 2010. His talk focussed on some recent developments in the rapidly emerging area of Bioimage Computing which is allowing us to study the dynamic processes of life in a new light.