Clinical and Translational Imaging Lab Launched at SBASSE

Tuesday, July 10, 2018

The Syed Babar Ali School of Science and Engineering (SBASSE) at LUMS launched the Clinical and Translational Imaging Lab on June 1, 2018. This is in line with the University’s mission to achieve the highest academic standards and provide state-of-the-art teaching and research facilities to its faculty and students.

“The Clinical and Translational Imaging lab will open a whole new world of multidisciplinary research to the students of SBASSE. Research in this lab will exploit engineering and applied mathematical tools to address problems at the frontier of Smart Healthcare,” said Dr. Hassan Mohy-ud-Din, Director Clinical and Translational Medicine Lab, SBASSE. Driven with a passion for a career in academia and research, Dr. Mohy-ud-Din felt that he had to set-up a lab where he could work with his students on cutting-edge research at the intersection of applied mathematics and medical imaging.

Additionally, this lab will attract students from Electrical Engineering, Computer Science, Mathematics, Physics, and Biology with a long-term goal of a career in biomedical imaging. Research themes being pursued in Clinical and Translational Imaging lab seamlessly gel with the multidisciplinary courses being offered at LUMS and provide a unique set of applications to the tools learned in these courses which remain elusive in Pakistan.

Also driven by the need of the country, this facility will provide a symbiotic relationship between engineering, mathematics, and clinical sciences. More specifically, the lab will pursue research themes at the intersection of optimisation theory, deep learning, and multi-modality (medical) imaging. The over-arching goal is to provide robust, scalable, portable, and cost-effective solutions to clinical problems and, concurrently, multidisciplinary training and development of future scientists.

This pioneering effort is being funded by a start-up grant awarded by SBASSE and a research grant awarded by the Higher Education Commission (HEC) and Planning Commission of Pakistan. In January 2018, the HEC and Planning Commission of Pakistan had announced to fund several labs under the umbrella of the National Centre in Big Data and Cloud Computing. This lab got selected from 200+ labs from all over Pakistan and is the only one focused on multi-modality (medical) imaging.

With this facility the University aims to produce highly qualified graduates which take leadership positions at the national and global levels.