Leads: Professor Katherine Vallis, Associate Professor Geoff Higgins and Professor Gillies McKenna

The Cancer Imaging Centre in Oxford is one of four national Centres funded by a strategic initiative between CRUK and the EPSRC. Its establishment was headed by the CRUK/MRC Oxford Institute for Radiation Oncology to develop advanced image-based methods for use in cancer therapy, diagnosis and prognosis.

Managed from within the Department of Oncology, the Cancer Imaging Centre is built upon a University-wide and industrial consortium of imaging researchers and brings together multi-disciplinary teams including radiologists, surgeons, radiation oncologists, medical oncologists, biologists, chemists, engineers and mathematicians. Together, through basic science, preclinical and clinical studies, they explore how imaging and image-analysis can be used to help select the most appropriate patients for treatment as well as how image-derived information can be used to guide treatment choices and direct assessment of response to therapy.

Strategy and Management

Imaging by its nature is multidisciplinary and one very important goal for the Cancer Imaging Centre is to facilitate these interactions, leading to novel strategies to address important clinical issues. As such, the Cancer Imaging Centre acts as the nucleus for the cancer imaging research community in Oxford, providing a forum for creating strategy and setting priorities to ensure translation of fundamental research into patient benefit.

Training is a key element of the Cancer Imaging Centre, funding Clinical Research Fellows, postdoctoral scientists and DPhil students.  In addition to collaborating within and between CICO programmes, we are members of the University of Oxford Biomedical Imaging Network promoting new opportunites for research. CICO seminars are held monthly and are a mixture of talks from our trainees and invited external speakers from partner organisations.  Collaboration between the four imaging centres is facilitated by the annual Cancer Imaging Conference hosted by each centre in rotation. Our investigators also meet annually at the CICO Retreat in Oxford to share that year's successes and identify novel avenues of research.

The Cancer Imaging Centre was awarded its second 5-year grant in December 2013, currently overseen by Co-Directors Professor Kate Vallis and Associate Professor Geoff Higgins, both of the Department of Oncology. The Board is made up of the Principal Investigators of each programme and the Imaging Centre’s Project Manager. There is also an International Scientific Advisory Board which meets at the annual Retreat.  

Research

Research is divided into six programmes across the University of Oxford partner departments of Oncology, Chemistry, Engineering and Mathematics.

The Centre supports members in accessing various resources including the Early Phase Clinical Trials Unit, the NIHR Oxford Biomedical Research Centre, the Cancer Research UK Oxford Centre and partner Departments.