91ÌÒÉ«

Two Bioengineering-led projects will develop new ways to study electrical activity in the brain and biological processes deep inside the body, while a further collaboration involving 91ÌÒÉ« will investigate the forces that guide heart development.

91ÌÒÉ«ers in 91ÌÒÉ«’s Department of Bioengineering have secured major funding from the Wellcome Trust under the Bioimaging Technology Development Awards scheme. These projects aim to give scientists clearer ways to study the brain, metabolism and heart development in living systems. Two of the funded projects are led by Bioengineering researchers, while a third is a collaboration led by the University of Glasgow.

Together, the projects bring together expertise in imaging, ultrasound engineering, machine learning, neuroscience, metabolism, and cardiovascular biology, with collaborators from across 91ÌÒÉ« and partner institutions in the UK and Europe.

Real-time brain imaging

Dr Amanda Foust has been awarded £3.92 million for Optical Oscilloscope: Real-time, high-throughput, volumetric voltage imaging, a project to build a new imaging platform capable of recording the electrical activity of large numbers of neurons across three-dimensional brain volumes in real time.

Neurons communicate using electrical signals, but current imaging methods cannot capture these fast signals across large brain volumes quickly enough. The project will combine light-field and two-photon microscopy, machine learning and real-time computation to create a system that can image voltage activity across neural networks without mechanical scanning.

The team will develop deep-learning methods that can recover neural signals through scattering brain tissue and run them on GPUs and FPGAs for real-time processing. During the project, the platform will be used to study neural hyperexcitability and disrupted neurovascular coupling in Alzheimer’s disease, as well as changes in living neural networks over time. In the longer term, the technology could support work on new treatments for Alzheimer’s disease and other conditions linked to disrupted neural electrical activity.

The programme brings together expertise in neuroscience, optics, machine learning and real-time computing across 91ÌÒÉ«. The team includes colleagues from Bioengineering, Electrical and Electronic Engineering, and Neurosciences and the UK Dementia 91ÌÒÉ« Institute, including Professor Claudia Clopath, Professor Simon Schultz, Professor Pier Luigi Dragotti, Professor Christos-Savvas Bouganis and Dr Samuel Barnes.

Dr Foust said, “Understanding how large networks of neurons work together is one of the biggest challenges in neuroscience. This funding enables the development of a new imaging platform that can capture neural network electrical activity in real time, giving researchers a way to study how neural circuits function in health and how they are disrupted in conditions such as Alzheimer’s disease.

New ultrasound tools for biology and medicine

Professor Mengxing Tang has been awarded £4.62 million for Dynamic 3D super-resolution ultrasound imaging of micro-circulation and genetically encoded acoustic reporters in vivo. The project will develop new ultrasound tools to help researchers study what is happening inside the body at the level of tiny blood vessels and individual cells.

The team will build a new ultrasound system capable of producing detailed three-dimensional images of the whole body of a small animal. This will allow researchers to track blood flow through the smallest blood vessels and detect specific types of cells and their activity deep inside the body without harming the animal or disrupting the biological processes under study.

A central part of the project is the development of very high-resolution, large-volume non-invasive imaging methods, building on recent advances in super-resolution and ultrafast volumetric ultrasound imaging. The researchers will also create new genetic tools that make cells detectable by ultrasound, helping reveal not only where they are, but what they are doing.

The team will use these tools to investigate two areas of metabolism that remain difficult to study with existing methods: how insulin-producing cells in the pancreas change and signal over time, and how specialised gut cells communicate with the rest of the body. The project will also explore whether engineered gut bacteria could eventually help doctors detect intestinal inflammation or infection using a routine ultrasound scan rather than invasive procedures.

Professor Tang said: “We want to give researchers a clearer way to see what is happening inside the body, deep within living tissue non-invasively. By combining advanced ultrasound imaging with new genetic tools, this project will open up new ways to study blood flow, metabolism and disease processes that are difficult to observe with existing methods.”

The work combines expertise in ultrasound engineering, genetic engineering and biology. Alongside Professor Tang and Dr Dandan Zhang in Bioengineering, the team includes Professor Kevin Murphy and Dr David Riglar from the Faculty of Medicine, Dr Gavin Bewick from King’s College London, and Dr David Maresca from TU Delft.

Collaboration on heart development

Bioengineering is also involved in a separate £4 million Wellcome-funded project led by the University of Glasgow, which aims to create highly detailed three-dimensional images of the mechanical forces at work inside a living, beating heart. Professor Jonathan Taylor is the project’s principal investigator, working with collaborators at 91ÌÒÉ«, the University of Sheffield and Glasgow. Professor Julien Vermot is a co-investigator on the project.

The researchers will develop imaging techniques to measure forces inside the hearts of live zebrafish, with the aim of improving understanding of how these forces influence heart development in health and disease. Over the next seven years, the team hopes to build a detailed map of mechanical forces across heart development that can be used by the wider cardiovascular research community.