Biomedical imaging increasingly involves multiple modalities and/or imaging time points. Advances in instrumentation opens up exciting potential for synergistic imaging. This EPSRC-funded collaborative computational project (CCP) aims to bring together the best of the UK's and international image reconstruction expertise to make this potential a reality. CCP SyneRBI (Synergistic Reconstruction for Biomedical Imaging) is the successor of CCP PETMR, extending the scope to other multi-modal biomedical imaging systems, concentrating on SPECT, PET and MR reconstruction, but including PET/CT and SPECT/CT systems.

CCP SyneRBI has the following primary aims:

• Networking and community:
  • Bringing together expertise: improve communication between researchers and initiatives to advance the understanding of multi-modal imaging data, algorithms and scope for synergy.
  • Training the next generation: target young researchers, from Masters, to PhDs and postdocs to develop the future leaders in the field.
• Expanding open source software (OSS) infrastructure: enable researchers to use a high-quality common framework for cross-modality algorithm development, concentrating on SPECT, PET and MR reconstruction, potentially using “side-information” from images from other time points and imaging modalities. The software will be powerful enough to handle real data, but simple enough to be used for training and fast prototyping.
• Translation towards biomedical research: create validated comprehensive pipelines for raw-data-to-end-result in clinical research studies, and train end-users in advanced synergistic image reconstruction methods to enable proof-of-concept studies.

CCP SyneRBI is funded by the EPSRC from 1 April 2020 - 31 March 2025. The PI is Kris Thielemans (UCL) and the CoIs are Andrew Reader (KCL), Charalampos Tsoumpas (UoLeeds), David Atkinson (UCL), Julian Matthews (UoManchester) and Matthias Ehrhardt (UoBath). CCP SyneRBI benefits from a wide membership of our Steering Panel, which meets twice yearly. See the Reports section of our website for past meetings.

The following documents provide an overview of the CCP and its aims:

• CCP SyneRBI case for support
• CCP PETMR becomes CCP SyneRBI
• CCP PETMR Project Proposal
• CCP PETMR Overview

The following figure shows the software architecture:

External Links

A list of PET facilities is at: http://www.ncri-pet.org.uk/pet_scanning_and_cyclotron_facilities.php