Question: Why is your research important? And what are the real world applications to your research?

Thomas Biggans answered on 17 Jun 2016:

My research is important because it can lead to earlier and more accurate findings of disease or improved treatment of disease. By more accurate I mean that we have less false positives and less false negatives. A false positive is when our test says that the patient has a disease but they actually don’t. A false negative is when our test says the patient doesn’t have a disease but they actually do. It’s really important to make our tests as accurate as possible so that we don’t treat a patient for something they don’t have and we also always find the disease if it is there so the patient can start treatment straight away.

So the real word applications of my research is medicine. Some of my research is on the equipment we use to scan patients and ways to make this better. Improvements can be making the scan more reliable but they can also be about improving the patient experience for example making the scanner less noisy or take less time. The other side of my research is patient studies. We try and find patterns in patients with a particular type of disease because some of these patterns can give us a clue and what is causing the disease or provide another way to improve the accuracy of our tests without having to improve the equipment.