Achieving Impact in Healthcare: From Mathematics to Clinical Support Systems and Devices

Background With a rapidly ageing global population and challenges such as the growth of antibiotic resistance, there has been significant growth in the global incidence of chronic and infectious health conditions. Furthermore, the number of people living with two or more chronic health conditions is forecast to treble by 2030. In the light of this, EPSRC introduced a set of Grand Challenges for Healthcare Technologies and issued a strategic call in 2015 to set up a number of Centres for Mathematics in Healthcare within the UK, where the remit of the Centres is to develop and apply modern mathematical ideas to problems of potential impact to healthcare.

As a result of this call, five EPSRC Mathematics for Healthcare Centres, based at Cambridge, Exeter Glasgow, Imperial and Liverpool have been funded to a total of £10m. These Centres were established in 2016 and aim to establish an ongoing programme of research and impact activities in this area, beyond the lifetime of the initial funding period. In addition to their complementary research programmes, the Centres are nurturing a new generation of researchers able to bring advanced mathematical techniques to new areas of healthcare and medicine.

Aims and Objectives This joint workshop of the five Centres focused on translating mathematical research into technological advances, as well as outreach and linkage with clinicians and end-user companies. It presented the opportunity to hear in detail about the project collaborations, research and outcomes from each Centre. The programme aimed not only to nurture the mathematical research associated with the Centres, but to engage end-users to ensure that best practice is spread as widely as possible.

The Programme featured talks from all five Centres. The themes of ‘Clinical Support Systems’, ‘Population Medicine ’ and ‘Mathematical Challenges” were explored. Talks covered a range of topics, including cross-methodology challenges for specific disease groups, cross-disease challenges for specific methodologies and machine learning customised for medical imaging.

This workshop also aimed to coordinate and consolidate the research agenda within the Maths for Healthcare space for the subsequent five years and scope out a proposal for a six month Research Programme on the Mathematics of Healthcare to be held at the Isaac Newton Institute.

The event was of interest to researchers, clinicians and healthcare technologists from biomedical imaging, mathematics, engineering, computer science, biology and medicine and presents the opportunity for knowledge exchange and networking between senior scientists with relevant individuals from industry and government.