Speaker: Professor Peter Gardner

Professor Gardner is head of the biomedical spectrosopy group in the Department of Chemical Engineering, University of Manchester

Peter has spent the last 30 years using vibrational spectroscopy to study real world systems particularly biomedical samples.  He joined the University of Manchester in 1994 after previous research positions at the Fritz Haber Institute in Berlin and the University of Cambridge. His work focuses on using infrared spectroscopy to study cancer biopsy sample with the aim of making better diagnosis. He is currently president of the International Society for Clinical Spectroscopy.

Synopsis

Prostate cancer is now the most common cancer overall across the UK. Driven by earlier diagnoses and an aging population, cases are surging, with over 63,000 new cases reported annually and approximately 11,000 deaths. This rise in cases is putting a significant strain on pathology services and calls for increased screening will only exacerbate and already difficult situation. The dilemma is deciding who needs radical treatment and who just needs to be monitored. While active surveillance is the correct course of treatment for the majority of men, some men have a more aggressive form of disease that does not reveal itself in a normal biopsy. In this talk I will show how infrared spectroscopic imaging of biopsy samples, coupled with machine learning,  may enable us to detect these cases and help both patents and clinicians make better treatment decisions.