EPSRC Vacation Bursary Scheme

Please read the accompanying guidance notes before completing the attached form.

The report form should be completed by the awarding department and the student as soon as possible after the student has been selected.

The form should be returned to Christine Twigg at the Faculty Graduate Education Office by Friday 16th April 2010:

Email: @manchester.ac.uk

Post: Room C4, Sackville Street Building

Telephone: 0161 306 5902

Department and Supervisor Details:
Host University: University of Manchester
Host Department: School of EEE
Student Supervisor: Dr. F. Costen
Email Address:
Student Details and undergraduate degree course details:
Students’ full name:
Email Address (mandatory):
Gender:
Age:
Country of Origin:
Ethnicity:
Full or Part time working: Full time undergraduate student
Start date of the undergraduate degree course:
End date of the Undergraduate Degree Course:
Undergraduate Degree Course Details:
Vacation Bursary Details:
Start Date of the vacation Bursary:14th of June, 2010
End Date of the Vacation Bursary:17th of September, 2010( 4 weeks holiday in July- August)
Vacation Bursary Project Title: Increase of the spatial resolution of digital human
phantom for computation in electromagnetics
Is the research being carried out by internationally leading groups, eg groups that hold EPSRC Portfolio Partnership or IRC grants?
The Microwave and Communications Group to which Dr. Costen belongs is part the 2.95-rating(RAE2009) EEE of the University of Manchester. The 13-strong group also hosts the Electromagnetics Centre that was established
by an EPSRC JIF grant of 1.84M GBP for Microwave and Millimetre-wave Design and
Applications.
Is the project considered to fall within one of the identified ‘Robert’s Shortage Areas’ of Statistics and Operational Research, ICT, Engineering or Materials?
The project falls within ICT and Engineering
Objectives and how this fits into a larger scale project, (if relevant):
One of the research projects our group is running is development of the software which computes ECG or body surface potentials in order to make ECG more sense to clinician. Currently we can not identify which part of the human heart has arrhythmogenic foci from the glance of ECG. The localisation of arrhymogenic foci is very important for the successful ablation. To understand the relationship between ECG waveform deviation from the normal waveform and the location of the arrhythmogenic foci, clinicians need an accurate ECG simulator. We have had three kind of digital human phantoms in our group from UK, USA and NICT in Japan. All of these are 2mm spatial resolution. The best data was from NICT which has had 55 tissues in the data whist the rest of the data had less than 50 tissues.
On 10th of March, 2010, our group acquired a new digital human phantom from different Japanese Institute called Riken. Since this data is officially not in public, being still under the discussion of Health and Safety committee in Riken, there is no experience in using this data for computation in electromagnetics. The key point of this data is 1mm spatial resolution and 73 tissues segmented in the data.
However, to make use of the new data practically, the following activity is required.
Although we have now 1mm spatial resolution data, we still need the higher spatial resolution for more accurate computation, especially around the heart. Therefore, we need to re-sample the digital human phantom in order to make 0.3 mm spatial resolution digital human phantom. This re-sampled data should not have the same practical resolution as the 1mm resolution data. This means the normal spatial re-sampling does not work for our case. Instead, we need the data smoothing and re-sampling. This project requires the development of an algorithm for the data smoothing and re-sampling and implementation of the algorithm.