Prof Simon Arridge
UCL Professor of Image Processing
Simon Arridge has been Professor of Image Processing in the Department of Computer Science, UCL, since 2001. He is also a visiting professor in the Department of Mathematics UCL, since 2011. He is Director of the UCL Centre for Inverse Problems which was opened in 2013. His research interests are in Inverse Problems with particular interest in Image Reconstruction in Medical Imaging. He has been a member of the editorial board of the Institute of Physics journal ‘Inverse Problems’ since 2000 and takes over as Editor-in-Chief in 2015. He is widely known for pioneering the development of Diffuse Optical Tomography which produces images of optical absorption and scattering parameters in tissue from measurements of transmitted or reflected light in the near-infrared part of the spectrum. He has developed extensive numerical modelling and image reconstruction tools for optical imaging which are widely used in the community. He has a strong interest in multimodal and coupled-Physics imaging techniques, including PET-MRI, PhotoAcoustics and Ultrasound Modulated Optical Tomography, amongst others.
GIFT-Surg focus
PhotoAcoustic Tomography (PAT) is capable of producing very high resolution multispectral images of optical parameters several centimeters inside tissues. It is currently too slow to use in real time because of a trade-off in resolution and signal-to-noise ratio.
A technique was recently patented for significantly accelerating this methodology using a combination of compressed sensing and time-series analysis methods. The enabling technology is the use of a spatial light modulator to acquire patterns of signals rather than pointwise samples. Simon is developing these ideas within a separately funded EPSRC project and will bring them into the foetal-surgery project as the ability to image endoscopically becomes developed. He aims to obtain realtime images in 3D with multispectral facility.