Small Starter Grant supported Mina Kim on US research trip
Dr Mina Kim, Senior Research Fellow in the Quantitative Imaging Group at University College London, was awarded a BIOREME Small Starter grant in October 2022. The grant funded travel and accommodation costs of a research visit to Philadelphia in February 2023. Mina has written the following summary of her activities on this trip:
“I attended the 2023 International Workshop on Pulmonary Imaging meeting in Philadelphia, USA. This biannual workshop brings together international experts from across many disciplines and industry who study a wide range of topics from lung physiology and mechanics and work to develop new imaging tools and applications for better understanding the structure and function of the lungs. I presented work on an advanced functional lung MRI method, which has shown to significantly enhance image quality and allow repeated measures in clinical MRI scanners with high reproducibility and sensitivity.
During the workshop, I met multi-disciplinary researchers and had an opportunity to visit Functional and Metabolic Imaging Group (FMIG) in the Center for advanced magnetic resonance imaging and spectroscopy at University of Pennsylvania. The FMIG have expertise in preclinical lung modelling with hyperpolarised 129-xenon (129Xe) MRI among only a small number of groups in the world that are capable of this technology for preclinical research. I was able to understand in detail the research and facility at the FIMG and initiate a collaboration with them.
As my research goal is to develop physiological models using advanced quantitative lung imaging and combine the different expertise to accelerate the development of technologies into potential tools for new or improved diagnostic methods for lung diseases, a future collaboration with the FIMG is expected to be of great help for achieving this goal in translational lung modelling and its validation research.
Thank you to BIOREME for supporting me in attending the workshop and initiating the international collaboration.””
A pre-print of the work Mina presented at the workshop can be found here.
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