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Samuel Vennin and Georgie Bird, Young Member Panel, BmED and Chair, Healthcare Technologies Student and Early Career Awards, reported on the day’s events as selected researchers came from all over the country to One Birdcage Walk, London.
Each year, the Awards offer to researchers in the early stages of their career an opportunity to showcase their work to business and academics leaders in the wide field of bioengineering. Jury panels composed of a mix of BmED board members and industrial partners awarded prizes to the best podium and poster presentations.
The event started with poster presentations. In the mixed undergraduate/MSc category sponsored by Device Access: Ffion Edwards, University of Southamton won the top prize for her poster on heat propagation in malignant solid tumours. Anna Mita, University of Leeds, and Christina Kassab, Imperial College London, were the runners-up.
The PhD Poster category was sponsored by the NIHR Surgical MedTech Co-Operative. A poster on a novel in-shoe tool for strain analysis mapping of the plantar surface for diabetic foot ulcer risk assessment earned Sarah Crossland from the University of Leeds the top prize. Ryan Trueman and Emmanouil Dimitrakakis from Unversity College London were joint runners-up.
Vicon sponsored the prize for Best Medical Engineering Undergraduate Project, won by Jinhong Wang, Imperial College London. His presentation focused on the prediction of hip-knee-ankle and femorotibial angles from knee radiographs using deep learning. Douglas Clements, University of East London, and Jack Chester, Imperial College London, also presented their work and won prizes.
The DePuy Prize for Best Medical Engineering PhD Project was awarded to Sophie Louth, University of Southampton, for her utilisation of additive manufactured lattices in a new hip spacer. Matt Thornton, University College London, and Robert Elkington, University of Leeds, were the runners-up.
The event closed with the Patrick Finlay Memorial Lecture which honoured the work and legacy of the former chair of the BmED, one of the strongest advocates of the role of engineers in healthcare. To honour Patrick’s work in robotic surgery, Brian Davies, Emeritus Professor of Medical Robotics at Imperial College London, discussed his personal experiences of developing cost-effective orthopaedic robot systems and suggested some of the ways that these can be made more effective.