RSE/Scottish Government Sabbatical Research grant awarded to Prof Dirk Husmeier

Congratulations to Prof Dirk Husmeier who has been awarded an RSE/Scottish Government Sabbatical Research grant by the Council of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (RSE). The focus of Dirk's sabbatical year is translational research aiming to bring mathematical modelling and statistical inference into the clinic.

Dirk explained:

“Our School has made impressive progress in the mathematical modelling of the mechanical processes in the heart, and a recent study conducted in our School has provided clear evidence that the underlying biomechanical parameters have real diagnostic value for prognostication of myocardial infarction (heart attack). However, the estimation of these parameters non-invasively from magnetic resonance images is computationally expensive and can take several weeks. One of the key goals of my research is to use statistical emulation to substantially reduce the computational costs and work towards a clinical decision support system that can make prognostications in real time. One of the particular challenges of this research is to find a low-dimensional representation of the left ventricle of the heart. I will further work on systematically correcting the potential bias that may result when a clinician prescribes medical interventions based on and interfering with the predictions from an automatic decision support system.”

Congratulations Dirk!