EPSRC Pilot Vacation Bursary Scheme

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: [email protected]@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: [email protected] Student Details and undergraduate degree course details:

Students’ full name: Aleksandr Kudasev Email Address (mandatory): [email protected] Gender: Male

Age: 31

Country of Origin: Estonia

Ethnicity: Other

Full or Part time working: Full time undergraduate student

Start date of the undergraduate degree course: September 2008

End date of the Undergraduate Degree Course: June 2012

Undergraduate Degree Course Details: Second year MEng Computer Systems Engineering

Vacation Bursary Details:

Start Date of the vacation Bursary:14th of June, 2010

End Date of the Vacation Bursary:17th of September, 2010( 2weeks holiday in July and 2 weeks in August)

Vacation Bursary Project Title: Development of the tissue property for a high-resolution 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 out there. The key point of this data is 1mm spatial resolution and 73 tissues segmented in the data. This is a very high quality digital human phantom. However, to make use of the new data practically, the following activity is required. Each tissue needs the appropriate media parameters such as conductivity and permittivity. Our research group has been using the measurement data produced by US Air Force to obtain the Debye media parameters for each tissue by the Newton method for data fitting. However, there are only 45 tissues are available from this US measurement data. This means we have more than 25 tissues which need a new tissue property. Usually the tissue property of a couple of tissues are used to make a new tissue properties. However, we need to study a tissue property prior to do this data manipulation. Therefore the summer project is the determination of the new tissues in the new digital human phantom usable for the computation in electromagnetics in high performance computing. Aleksandr has got the necessary skills ( extensive programming experience in Unix environment and mathematics ) and he should be able to complete the task within 10 weeks in Summer.