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To apply for a research degree, please make sure you fulfill the entry requirements and then complete the online research degree application form and upload your supporting documents.
You should have a good honours degree (2:1 or above) or masters degree or equivalent in the relevant subject area.
International applicants should be aware of our research degree English language requirements
The Centre for Computer Graphics and Visualisation (CCGV) has worked with European partners for many years, in particular with Istituto Ortopedico Rizzoli, the Cineca Supercomputer Centre and the BioComputing Competence Centre (B3C) in Bologna and Université Libre de Bruxelles in Belgium, on what is called (informally) the Living Human Project (LHP). This continues to develop a structure to support all aspects of work on musculo-skeletal modelling and, more generally, computational biomechanics. The blend of expertise in bioengineering at IOR, in high-performance computing at Cineca, in biomodelling at B3C, in anatomy at ULB and in visualisation at Bedfordshire (or De Montfort University, prior to 2003) has proved particularly effective, and this collaboration will continue into new projects.
To give you a little background to the story. When, 11 years ago, we started what has become the LHP, all European research in musculo-skeletal computational biomechanics was taking place in very small labs of 1 or 2 persons in departments whose primary role was to act as service departments to hospitals treating patients with musculo-skeletal disorders. Given the prevalence of these conditions (more motion-capture systems are used in hospitals than in the entire entertainment industry), research was (and still is) marginalised.
Our first actions were to create a coherent community, by establishing the Biomechanics European Laboratory via the BioNet project (IST-2000-28074) and to produce a coherent set of high-quality 4D data and the tools to investigate them in VAKHUM (IST-1999-10954). This led to the Multimod project (IST-2000-28377) in which we created the Multimod Application Framework (MAF); this is an open source product, encapsulating VTK, ITK and other libraries, that provides a rapid-development environment for biomedical software. MAF also supports DataManager, which we developed to provide multimodal display of disparate information. A new version of MAF is currently under development and will be released in early 2011. Future CCGV projects will build on this base.
More recently, we became involved in setting up links to other projects which are concerned with other aspects of the functioning human, not only the musculo-skeletal area. By happy coincidence, the EC was thinking along the same lines and announced in June 2006 the launch of the Virtual Physiological Human (VPH) initiative. This fitted within the context of the Physiome project that had been rapidly gaining ground in the previous few years, so much so that a special issue of the Proceedings of the IEEE (to which CCGV contributed) was devoted to it in 2006. Two special issues of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A were devoted to VPH in September 2008; CCGV co-edited these and such special issues have now become an annual occurrence.
The Physiome project is a huge, international effort involving loosely coupled projects that are attempting, over time, to create a coherent model of the complete human physiology across all scales from the genome up to the whole body. It is a “grass roots” endeavour, with international scientists coming together to pool their efforts in an informal way, using whatever funding they can acquire to further the overall effort.
The VPH is a focused subset of that, with a greater emphasis on early industrial and clinical relevance. It will create a computational framework to facilitate the understanding of the integrative function of molecules, cells, tissues, and organisms and, by this, to construct a multiscale in silico model of the human physiology.
The 3 CCGV projects that started in 2006 all fitted into the VPH context. One of these, STEP, was a Coordination Action which delivered a Roadmap to help the Commission to plan the future direction of the VPH; STEP finished in March 2007. LHDL: the Living Human Digital Library concluded in January 2009 and was nominated for an award for excellence by the European Commission; and Aneurist, an integrated project with over 30 partners, successfully concluded in March 2010.
Three further projects, VPHOP, VPH2 and Contra Cancrum, were funded under the VPH Call for Proposals of late 2007 and another three projects, MSV, RT3S and NMS Physiome, were funded the VPH Call for Proposals of April 2009.
Two additional projects will begin in September 2010; VPH-FET is a follow-on from STEP and will investigate Future & Emerging Technologies that can be applied within the VPH context, while VPHOP-EEU was awarded funding to extend the successful work in VPHOP further.
A Marie Curie project on GPU-based rendering, GAMVolVis, commenced in September 2009.
CCGV is also a general member of the VPH Network of Excellence.
