Star-gazing pays off for Edinburgh spin-out
17 November 2010
A couple of star-gazing astronomers could help save your life. Dr Ben Panter and Professor Alan Heavens, from the University of Edinburgh’s School of Physics and Astronomy, developed a technology to analyse the starlight of distant galaxies, and now they’re using it for medical imaging. They realised that this technology, with its incredible processing speed, can apply to astronomy, medicine, or any field where incredibly large amounts of data present a problem. They have built a company called Blackford Analysis to apply their algorithm to medical imaging and other fields.From looking at millions of galaxies in outer space to examining the minute details of medical images depicting hearts, brains, and bones, Blackford Analysis has shown amazing ingenuity and an ability to collaborate across disparate fields. These qualities have led to their rapid success, and to their receiving two awards – one for Innovation, and another for Collaboration (the latter sponsored by the Edinburgh Science Triangle) - at the Nexxus
Life Science Awards (East) event in Edinburgh on 16 November. “We’re delighted to win these awards – it’s a great reward for the effort that our team has put in over the years, taking this from a piece of blue skies research to a real clinical application – both technically and commercially. The support of Scottish Enterprise and the University of Edinburgh throughout this process has been considerable, and I’d really like to thank both bodies for recognising the potential of the idea at an early stage. We look forward to working with medical imaging companies to get our innovation into routine clinical use worldwide,”
said Dr Ben Panter, Chief Executive of Blackford Analysis, on accepting the two awards. (Pictured from left to right, Till Bachmann, University of Edinburgh and Chair of Nexxus (East) Steering Group, Dr. Ben Panter, CEO of Blackford Analysis, Professor Alan Heavens, University of Edinburgh School of Physics and Astronomy, Malcolm Bateman, Edinburgh Science Triangle, and Graeme Boyle, Nexxus Director.)
"Convergence of technology can greatly assist Scotland's life science industry,"
said Graeme Boyle, Nexxus Director.
"The ability of the scientists at Blackford Analysis to transcend traditional boundaries and instigate cross-disciplinary collaborations has led to an incredibly innovative solution to a real technological and medical need. Vision such as this is just what Scotland needs to keep its place on the global life science stage."
The technology Ben and Alan developed, called MOPED, is an algorithm that has a remarkable capacity to compress data. They invented it because they wanted better data processing speed in their astronomy research – which it achieved, improving performance over standard techniques by a factor of one thousand and enabling the interpretation of spectra from half a million galaxies where previously only a few hundred had been possible. It soon became clear to them that this technology had many more applications. The first one they are addressing is medical imaging.
The collaborative effort to move the star-gazing technology from the heights of Edinburgh’s Royal Observatory into the medical clinic started when Ben and Alan reached out to Dr Mark Bastin of the Scottish Funding Council Brain Imaging Research Centre. Funding from Scottish Enterprise enabled them to extend the team further with Drs Rob Tweedie and Will Hossack joining from the Institute of Physics. This multi-disciplinary team applied MOPED to the problem of aligning MRI and CT scan data, which can take many hours using standard techniques.
A modern radiology department increasingly deals with volumetric data – 3D scans from MRI or CT machines. While this can give much greater insight into many medical conditions, a key problem is the sheer size of the studies. Often gigabytes of data must be aligned before any interpretation can be made, particularly in clinical trials with multiple images taken over time.
This collaboration of Blackford Analysis Ltd, the Institute for Astronomy, a research and teaching group within the School of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Edinburgh, and the SFC Brain Imaging Research Centre resulted in the MOPED-based Registration Engine for medical imaging. This technology is orders of magnitude faster than current software, and allows radiologists to efficiently line up, view and compare multiple images. It can speed up radiologists’ work, improve the quality and resolution of medical images, and accelerate analysis of imaging data. The collaborative effort was supported by a Scottish Enterprise Proof of Concept Award and STFC funding.
Blackford Analysis was spun out from the University of Edinburgh in the summer of this year and attracted a six-figure seed investment. The company also received a SMART:SCOTLAND Feasibility Study Grant of £70K to extend the registration engine’s capabilities, and has attracted much interest and support from several multi-national medical imaging companies as well as from radiologists in the UK and US. The company will demonstrate its technology at the Radiological Society of North America meeting in December and plans to launch the Registration Engine in 2011. This product could generate savings of many millions of pounds by increasing radiologists’ throughput.
The company also plans to expand its reach by developing further collaborations and exploring applications in other fields. Ben won the THALES Scottish Technology Prize in 2009 for the application of this technology to Improvised Explosive Device detection, one of the many potential applications for the technology.
Runners up in the Nexxus 2010 Innovation Award (East) were Encap Drug Delivery for their DuoCap and Advanced Pest Solutions for Smidge that Midge insect repellent.
Runners up in the Nexxus 2010 Collaboration Award (East) - sponsored by Edinburgh Science Triangle - were Innova for their multiple collaborative partnerships in ProjectHydra, and Xeroshield for their collaboration with the Nonwovens Innovation Research Institute and Centre for Technical Textiles at Leeds University.
For further information contact Kate Fink, Marketing Communications Assistant, Nexxus T: 0131 200 6412,
M: 0780 577 4824, E: k.fink@nexxusscotland.com.
