 Great, so we'll get started. Welcome everyone to our virtual open day question and answer session with the Department of Medical Physics and Biomedical Engineering here at UCL. You can see we've got most of our postgraduate team here today. We're going to be talking about the various programs that we've got on offer and we're here to answer any questions that you might have as you go through our courses or consider applying for our courses next year. So let's start the presentation. Right, so yeah we're going to be looking at the master's programs today in the department which are the MSc or the MRes programs. Yeah, my name is Billy Dennis. I'm the postgraduate programs director so I oversee all the postgraduate programs here in the department, the ones that are taught with the lectures and modules. I'm also the distance learning tutor for our distance learning MSc although we've got a specific session on the distance learning next week where we talk about in much more detail about that so we'll probably get to that later. With us as well we've got Dr Rob Moss who's our radiation physics tutor specializing on that route of the MSc. We've also got Dr Henry Lancashire who specializes in our biomedical engineering and medical imaging route of the MSc as well as Matt Clarkson from who runs the medical robotics and artificial intelligence program. Dr Andre Altman who is our artificial intelligence and medical imaging tutor and also we've got Katarina Vega who runs our master's research projects and that's a major part of our all our MSc programs and MRes programs. So as a very important part and she's going to talk to you a little bit about how those projects run generally this year. So these are quick photos of the key staff. We've also got someone who's not here today, Professor Marenko Saranich who runs our MRes program normally but he's unavailable today so I'm going to be talking about that later. Also someone else you might come across later in the year Professor Dean Barrett who's our director of studies in the department runs the teaching in medical physics and biomedical engineering. So our department it's one of the oldest departments in the UK and also one of the largest with a broad range of different subject areas that we teach. The history of the program goes back to the Middlesex Hospital two centuries ago where the x-ray device was one of the first being operated in the UK and in 1913 we had the first world's first hospital physicist professor Sidney Russ who became the job professor of physics applied to medicine. So you can see that in terms of history of our department you know there's some real heritage here going back a number of years. As a subject area we are what we would certainly call multidisciplinary so we cover many different subject areas with academics with many different specialties broadly defined into engineering and physics and then computer science but also medicine medicine and biology as well. We sit as a department inside the engineering faculty and this gives us good access to all these different groups to collaborate with which is a key part of all our programs including the master's programs that we're going to talk about today. So we're quite a large department relatively in terms of research staff with 50 permanent academic staff and 80 researchers as well as 170 PhD students so there's good opportunities here if you're interested in careers and research and as master students you also get to benefit from the experience of all these cutting-edge researchers and on top of that we've got about 25 professional service staff and technicians to help support all that team so we're a reasonably large department with a good opportunity for you as students to join and get involved. In terms of what the strengths of our department in particular are is that we produce world-leading and internationally excellent research. It's well known I guess that UCL is quite high up in the university league tables right now I think eighth or ninth in the world rankings totally but particularly in our department the last ref the research excellent framework which is the UK's assessment of university research quality. Our department graded very very highly on these with a large number of papers being world-leading and excellent research. On top of that as a master's cohort it's a relatively small-ish program compared to some other departments so we usually have about 80 or 90 total master's students and given the number of researchers that we talked about before it means that we get to know our students quite well. We expect the students to integrate into our research groups and become members of the department in that way and as well as us teaching you all the latest technologies and techniques that are used in engineering applied to medicine we would expect you to contribute to that as well and join back. Another major strength of UCL's department for us is that because we are based in central London we are in some cases right next door to some very large hospitals. UCLH is the sister hospital of UCL and that's across the road from the main campus. There's also many other large hospitals in London that we collaborate with and this gives you excellent opportunity for clinician visits and to join research projects with real-world output in these big hospitals so that's a major strength of the department as well. In terms of our research I'll talk briefly about some of this. We've got many special sees in our department but broadly they can be broken down into five rough subject areas. The first being medical imaging which probably forms a large portion the largest portion of our department's research and that goes into many different imaging modalities including MRI and biomedical ultrasound but also we've got one of the larger biomedical optics research groups using lasers and invisible light for various means as well as quantitative medical imaging, electrical impedance tomography also some groups that look at electron microscopy and advanced ophthalmic imaging so there's quite a large expertise there. Also in our department probably one of the biggest things if you're interested in the radiation physics course is the radiation physics research groups in the department which look particularly at x-ray imaging and x-ray detectors and radiation detectors as well as the proton and advanced radiotherapy research that gets done in our department for cancer treatments that's connected heavily with the UCLA hospital right next door. There's also groups that look at different x-ray methods like x-ray diffraction as well that you'd be invited to join. A major part of the department is the computing strength of the department. We as I've mentioned are a cross-subject department really and one of the main links we have is with the computer science department here in engineering so we've got a lot of computing expertise as well used for various medical outputs including computer assisted navigation and diagnosis but also computer assisted surgery and radiotherapy image computing as well. We also have groups in more on the biomedical engineering side that look at implanted devices for monitoring and diagnosing issues in the body but also some interesting treatments for example electrical stimulation that's mentioned here, neural modulation and some various other optical and photo-acoustic monitoring and then something that has grown up a lot in the last 10 years or so is our robotics and AI group which the MSc Medical Robotics and AI is a key part of looking at surgical robotics and advanced artificial intelligence as it applies to healthcare. Now if you want to look up and I would strongly recommend you do our different research groups to find out how you could get involved with those in future years then you can look on our department website to look at this so if I just quickly share my screen overall I'll quickly go and show you what that looks like so our department website if you click on the research aspects you can find all kinds of information here you can look at spotlights on particular researchers to see what they've been up to and what the latest research they've been involved with but if you want to see what's available in our department then click on the research groups and you'll see that each of our major research groups have got their own set of web pages where you can go in and look at latest publications and what they've been up to so let's have a look at the biomedical optics lab you can see the different groups that are involved in here as well and some of the specialisms so if you want to learn more about what the department does in its research I would strongly recommend you have a look here on those research groups you can also look on the department website at the study options and postgraduate taught this is us so strongly recommend having a good look at our website to learn more about the different subjects okay so turning on next to I guess the purpose of today which is to look at the taught postgraduate programs generally our taught programs will fit into a base of one of these three different categories either they have a basis in physics they have a basis in engineering or a basis in computing now each of these subjects will of course require you to study a bit of all of these subjects we we cross many subject areas and that's a good benefit of the degree you get to learn about different subjects in the context of other experiences and so loosely what we're going to be talking about today are these five main degree programs really that fit within either the physics engineering or computing aspects and you can see computing aspects generally involve some kind of artificial intelligence applied to different problems i medical imaging is a specialty in medical robotics but we've also got the main msc perhaps of the pro of the department which is the physics and engineering and medicine which has two specialties either radiation physics route or the biomedical engineering and medical imaging routes and then we've also got the distance learning routes as well and then finally the m res department m res crosses really any of these options it gives you full flexibility to choose which subjects you'd like to study really and with the focus of getting you into research later in your career so we'll start off with the msc physics and engineering and medicine now this as i mentioned two really two main routes to this program one of which is based in radiation physics and one of which is based in biomedical engineering and medical imaging and so i'm going to pass over now to our lead of the radiation physics group group um dr rob mass who's going to talk a bit about the radiation physics msc program rob thanks billy hello everyone nice to meet you um yeah so i wanted to talk a little bit about the radiation physics route and this route is really for people who are interested in medical physics and careers and and this may include people that are interested in working in hospital but also the med tech sector and other related industries um the programs designed to teach key skills and i've tried to indicate that here on this slide so the um the ones that are highlighted in green are sort of key skills and the ones that are highlighted in orange are related to uh application so they're the different um module choices shown there um we offer two streams uh one is an accredited degree so this is accredited by the institute of physics and engineering medicine uh known as ipen ipen is the the recognized professional body for medical physics um and and that stream is ideal for people um with career ambitions to be a hospital physicist or a clinical scientist for example um the accredited degree is a fixed program so um the modules that are available are those in the the the first and the second boxes they're sort of core and the research modules um and uh there's no options um but we do also offer an unaccredited group um and this this has some flexibility um and that enables the person who's studying to pursue perhaps some other topics of interest in this area or to learn additional skills that may be relevant to the career that they want to undertake if you could flip to the next slide please Billy so uh to try and give you a bit of an idea of what program is right for who uh I've got these uh three students here um so Sally is interested in cancer radiotherapy and she wants to work in a hospital so the route that she's chosen is the ipen accredited route there's no options it's a fixed uh what we call a fixed diet there's no options optional modules um and at the you know the outcome of that is that she would be in a really good position to apply for hospital clinical scientist positions either via the uh the stp uh training scheme or what's called route two where you get a job as a as a junior trainee uh hospital physicist and and work your way up to uh full medical physics status in that way um our second student is Aaron Aaron's interested in uh radiation protection the route that uh Aaron's chosen is the unaccredited route because it gives him the flexibility to go and do the module in uh research software engineering and he's done this because he knows that uh any career in radiation protection is going to require a significant amount of Monte Carlo modeling so so he's decided that getting some familiarity uh with python for example would really help his chances of getting a job and he then leaves our program and goes and applies for a job in a manufacturer of radiation enclosures uh who build rooms for hospitals for example and then our third student is Kevin Kevin's interested in imaging technologies uh he's chosen the unaccredited route um because that gives him the opportunity to do the module in programming for medical image analysis uh that sets him up really well makes him very attractive for med tech companies and and in this case he could go and work for an ultrasound development company um whilst what we've spoken about here is very medical orientated I did want to just take the opportunity to say that you'll learn some really transferable skills here that are applicable across a number of areas so in terms of career of course healthcare providers would be interested in you it doesn't you know if you start doing your degree anything actually I really like academic research then you're in a really good position to be able to apply for PhDs as well um there's jobs at national laboratories um of course medical manufacturing if you want to make the big bucks then you go maybe working the financial services um but also like areas like the nuclear industry that may not be something that you thought about of you know straight away but actually um you're going to learn skills that make you really attractive to those employers as well so um thanks Billy uh we can move on thank you very great thank you Rob brilliant so um I'm then going to pass on to Henry who's going to discuss the biomedical engineering and medical imaging routes of the msc physics and engineering in medicine Henry thank you Billy thanks Rob so the biomedical engineering and medical imaging route is for anyone who's interested in the applications of imaging or engineering to medicine it's designed to be flexible so it gives you quite a wide range of choice with some core modules that you are required to take so I'm basically listed here some of these crossover with the students on the radiation physics uh stream so you'll be in with the same group of students from radiation physics for some modules and then for some additional modules for example medical electronics and control you'll be learning special skills in that case in engineering and uh signal processing targeted at medicine for engineers the options on the uh biomedical engineering and medical imaging routes are quite broad you have a choice of a large number of options and you can choose two of these options in your degree so you can tailor your degree to your interest whether that's an interest in the applications of combining engineering and computing designing image combining imaging computing construction devices or working in um orthopedics computer-assisted surgery elite slide please so example of some of the paths students have taken through the biomedical engineering and imaging route includes for example Leonora who was interested in medical devices and engineering and took the options on materials for orthopedics and in plastic human machine interfaces to move into uh industrial biomedical engineering Arnaud who was interested in clinical engineering possibility of working in healthcare and chose uh options from qt to assisted surgery and orthopedics to move into an nhs clinical engineering training program and leeway interested in medical computing who took specific programming foundations and computing and medicine and moved on to working with a medical software development company students from the biomedical engineering and imaging have gone on to work in a wide range of fields not only healthcare for example that healthcare providers with an academia but also going on to for example work in financial services undertake a law conversion to work in uh legal applications to medical devices in manufacturing and in software development so to summarize the biomedical engineering medical imaging stream is very flexible it gives you grounding in the different engineering and imaging skills you need but then gives you flexibility to choose your own path uh thank you billy right thank you Henry um so i'll move on to talk about the distance learning msc briefly as i mentioned there's a whole hour session we've got on it next wednesday so if you're interested in the distance learning program then uh i'd advise you join for that we'll talk about it in much more detail but just briefly the purpose of the distance learning program is to replicate our radiation physics accredited program from campus it's often taken by students who are currently working in hospitals as trainee medical physicists and need the msc as part of their professional training to become a clinical scientist but we also have a lot of people who perhaps need the benefit of the flexibility of an online taught program uh or even a multi-year taught program so we've got students across five consonants we have full-time students part-time students and you can take up to five years maximum if you'd like to complete the degree there's a lot more variation here in terms of how you study generally you study from the lecture videos that are given here on campus um but on top of that it comes with additional support resources uh including lots of time with the personal tutor which is myself but also extra exercises to really engage with your learning and make sure that you're studying in a way that's valuable and successful for you um it's certainly much more than just watch a lecture video or read a read a textbook uh it's much more interactive than that and that's how we found it's a much more effective way of studying by distance learning so um yeah in general you'll study relatively alone you've got the opportunity to do that that's that's what the course is for but you'll also have opportunity to actually interact with our students here on campus as part of the group project module called the medical device enterprise which we'll talk about later but that becomes your route to absolutely work with on research projects with other students um and additionally if you're UK based then you're more than welcome to come to campus as well for various points if you want to attend lectures some of our students perhaps work jobs but uh live in London and so can't attend every day so they can attend a little bit some students might come for a bonus lab or to meet their supervisor there's a lot of options here the distance learning allows you that flexibility on the radiation physics route okay next I'll move on to our msc and artificial intelligence and medical imaging uh which is run by Andre Altman Andre are you able to tell us a bit about that yeah thank you for the introduction Billy um yeah the the msc for AI and medical imaging is our newest msc and we started it because there has been a rapid demand and growth and a use of AI in healthcare and I think there's no day passes without new news on how AI is going to change our lives um as a consequence there's definitely growing employer demand and we thought we built this msc with um well with the mindset that you want to equip everybody with the with the tools to start working right right away in a health related field and imaging related field but also as an ideal starting point for further doctoral studies and as such is that the topics that we teach are closely tied to the AI research that we're conducting here at UCL and particularly at the center of medical image computing which is part of the computer science faculty and the uh medical physics faculty department and also the wise center for surgical interventions um next slide so yeah here's a short overview over the curriculum and um there are a couple of options there and a couple of core modules um so you can see in the core modules it's color coded whether something uh in I guess that's teal in light blue or teal these are computing and medical imaging and AI related topics so more of a CS content and the orange modules are medical imaging related contents and in the core modules you can see that there's going to be programming foundations machine learning uh for medical imaging information processing medical imaging and also biomedical ultrasound and then we have this box around the other two which are a couple of options that you can take already as part of your core learning um you can decide for instance between you for an additional medical imaging module whether to go for MRI and biomedical optics or into imaging with ionizing ionizing radiation so you're asked to take one of the two or you can actually take both and the other option you have to pick is between applied deep learning um so that covers a broader range of deep learning models that are not really specific um some of them are specific to imaging but not to medical imaging and then we have a newly crafted uh module that is really specific to applied AI and medical imaging to dealing with all the problems that you would typically encounter when trying to put those models to use in a clinic setting um the research component is there's a research project like with all other MSc programs and in the grayed out area this is an option that you can have um you can participate in the medical device enterprise scenario so it's one of the options you can pick um and then the right most column you can see all the options uh that we have available so you can pick two out of those ones um one per term and again they're color coded um so the blue ones uh are blue and the green one are computer related uh computing related and again uh yeah they're imaging medical imaging related ones um are MRI and biomedical biomedical optics and imaging and ionizing radiation so you can depending on the interest you can dive more and learn more about the imaging modalities that you've been working with or you can learn about more computational approaches so depending on where you want to move in the end after you were uh to study the end and I think that's it yeah great thank you Andre brilliant um so that moves us on neatly to our our second artificial intelligence based program the medical robotics and artificial intelligence which is run by matt clarkson matt are you okay to say something about this program yep so my name is matt i'm pleased to be presenting this course it's now running its third iteration so we're accepting entries for the for the fourth year of this course again uh likewise with Andre uh we're just uh well we're running this course sort of in response to you know a large increase in the demand for AI but um specifically I guess for this course uh for in in medical robotics and the use of AI and robotics in health care there's been a variety of reports out recently saying you know this is a strategic priority for the NHS for health care systems globally um and we've founded this off the back of our world leading research expertise in centres like uh wise and seemic that you've heard of basically uh it's closely tied in with ucl's research in this area at the time it was the first one in the UK and I think that there are other courses coming out so I can at least claim we were the first so that's good let's move on to the next slide and hopefully by this point you're starting to see kind of a common theme here so of the compulsory ones everyone does a research project I think that's one of the most fun parts of it uh and it's a major component but then we have core modules so for this MSc there's two core modules in term one and two core modules in term two so these are listed listed on the left so we start off uh we'll be studying some core robotic systems engineering and we've got a fairly new module basically AI uh specific for kind of the data that you might get in surgical or computer vision in surgery so this is I guess quite different from uh for example AI for medical imaging where you might be doing large you know AI studies on population studies for example this is specific to you know real-time data kind of data you get from surgical instruments surgical devices uh in surgery basically uh in term two then we then take our core robotics knowledge and start to look at uh then how robots are deployed clinically so uh medical robotics specifically there's a certain amount of regulation and a certain amount of design processes that you have to go through to make sure that something is safe to be used on humans so we're not talking about you know robots in a factory building a car we're talking about robots that are used to treat humans and so they must be safe to do so and obviously with increasing amount of data surgical data science is becoming key to informing our decision-making processes after that we've got a bunch of optional modules and I guess the type of module that you'll pick could depend on your past experience so for example someone who's not done much programming might prefer to polish up on their programming skills with research software engineering with Python someone who's done a lot of software could benefit from being a bit more clinically focused so there's the option of doing clinical practice there's more robotics modules also a sort of crossover technology how these things could be applied to computer assisted surgery more machine learning and new for next year off the back of well one of our new lecturers is developing a new module specifically in MRI guided devices so basically robots that you form you know mechanisms that you could design and build that would be MRI compatible so I think that's quite a wide range showing you basically how robots and AI can be used in healthcare specifically surgery I think that's it thank you great thank you Matt yeah so finally our final program which we'll mention today is the MRes in medical physics and biomedical engineering so this is slightly different as a master's degree to the other MSc programs the aim really for this program is for students who would like to take up a career in research in the future and it grounds you and gives you more opportunity to do a larger research project and then potentially you could follow it up with a phd afterwards although again that's funding dependent so you need to apply for those at the end of your master's as well but the fundamental difference is that the MRes forms two-thirds of the total credit for the module for the course the actual MRes project whilst an msc project only is only one-third so 120 credits versus 60 credits there um in terms of module selections really the design of it is is that you should pick modules that best suit what your research is going to be about things that complement your research topics so in that case we can you can select modules that cover any of the other programs that we've already looked at so perhaps if you're interested in artificial intelligence applications you can pick the modules that relate to that if you're interested in cancer therapy you can pick the radiation physics modules and if you're interested in biomedical engineering you can pick those or you can have a mix it's up to you really to pick that overall and this gives you a nice flexibility one thing that is again slightly different about it at the end is that we would expect at the end of the MRes that you produced a piece of research which could be publishable and as part of that I think I'll pass on now to Katarina who is our research project organiser who can talk about exactly how research projects work on our master's programs so Katarina thank you Billy so yeah my name is Katarina and I'm the coordinator for the projects now you heard about all the different degrees that you can choose but no matter if you go through a master's or MRes you'll have to do a research project and these research projects tend to form a really big part of the degrees that you're undertaking now as part of the projects really what you'll be doing is to find the answer to a research question that has not been answered before so really it's about doing a little bit of work with some novelty that fits into the scheme of projects and research that we have in the department so within the research projects you have the opportunity to work with the department which is a world-class research environment and Billy has mentioned a bit about the different groups that we have and the different areas of research so we have the opportunity to be embedded in these research groups and as part of your project you'll have two supervisors that will be guiding you through your research experience and they will be researchers that have a lot of experience in their fields and they'll be well suited to guide you to success in your projects now what's really interesting about the project is really it's an opportunity for you to get a lot of expertise in a very small part of the wide research landscape in which your degrees will be part so you'll become the true expert in that little bit of research that your thesis and your reports will be about and when we think about the project a lot of it is about you developing skills like data analysis, experimental skills, programming, all the hard skills that you need to get to your results but also there's other skills that you'll be developing such as communication and as part of your your projects you'll be writing a report but also have the opportunity to present your research findings in the form of a poster in the form of an oral presentation so really it will give you a wide range of transferable skills and finally just as kind of a big piece of advice is really an opportunity to push yourself right the projects are one of those there as much as you give in is as much to get in return and really it's a lot of pleasure to be able to advance quite significantly in your research so yeah next please Ili so just to give you a bit of a taste of the different types of projects that we have in the department they will range from a range of experimental projects to computational or some data analysis as well the first one that we have there was about electrical impedance tomography where they developed an ARNUS an experimental project for low-cost imaging um the the next one um can we do the next one really yeah so this was more of a computational project using machine learning to to do outcome modeling in a type of cancer next please uh I think this one didn't come through well but this was a bit on an experimental project again on surgery for image for non-invasive brain surgery next one this is also an example of a computational project on looking at different algorithms to reconstruct computer tomography with multi-contrast and here is also an experimental project on developing tissue equivalent phantoms for a specific type of imaging and then we have a last one as well which is an example of work that we've done in collaboration with clinical partners at looking to the symmetry when we have clips in the body for protein beam therapy so I hope this gives you an idea about the range of projects that we have and that's it from me Billy thank you great thank you Catarina um one other highlight which I'll just mention here of our postgraduate programs is uh this module which is a another research project module but this time is a group project module so the medical device enterprise scenario as it's called and um you will work in teams you'll be working in teams with on-campus students and and distance learning students as well the idea being that amongst all of us we've got lots of different expertise from different backgrounds you know we've got physicists we've got uh mechanical engineers we've got biomedical engineers we might have medics we might have computer scientists and uh it seemed like too much potential to put together um to waste so the idea is that you get together as a group and you need to invent a new medical device and then make a business plan to take that medical device to the market and sell it ideally so that's what the project's about um at the start of the year we give you a brief uh a problem for you to solve that you need to make the medical device uh to fix um so this is some previous examples of projects that have been done so uh robotics to help care home uh workers the idea being that staffing in care homes is a real difficult problem and and uh staff time is is uh hard to and expensive to pay for so the students that you're asked to make robotic devices to help to pull that so patients so they can become more independent like the item here on the left here is a mechanical bed with different pistons that uh can adjust the pressure at specific points on the bed uh one of the problems this group found out in in care homes was that patients who are immobile might get stuck in bed for days on end and they'll build up pressure sores ulcers on their body which can be very expensive and take a long time usually months to treat so this is an automatic bed that adjusts the pressure to make sure they it doesn't build up and they don't get those sores uh this example in the center is a autocomode as labeled by the group which is a a wheelchair with a toilet in it that can automatically come to patients who are in firm when they need it so it doesn't require the care home uh person to to come directly to the room with the chair or take them to the toilet the toilet comes to them and it's got some uh imaging technology on it so that it could automatically follow markers along the floor take it back to a cleaning station or to the patient's room where where needed so that was another interesting one and then this example here on the right was an automatic braille reader so it looks like a mouse and the idea is you scan that mouse over the top of any book or anything that you want to read and it will automatically read the text that's written there and translate it into a series of pins that raise up and down to make these little braille readings that that that allows the person who might be visually impaired to to to read any text that's written down so these are examples of previous years it's usually a really fun project an opportunity for you to work with different people with different backgrounds and yeah one of the highlights of our programs it's compulsory module on the physics and engineering and medicine program and it's an optional module on the AI program so you've got a choice whether you want to join in that case um so one of the the strengths of our department and the programs that you'd benefit from is is the strength of our collaborations that we've got uh with both within ucl but also external to ucl um this can include research groups so you can see at various universities uh around the world and here in london but also in particular the clinical groups that we find uh that we work with so hospitals across london there's a list of these here that that many of our researchers have have links with but also some uh pure research institutes such as the national physics law laboratory other universities around the world but also industry as well so we have a number of spin out companies that come from research done in departments some of them are direct from our department and others are just work that that many of our academics continue to do with outside groups and all of these collaborations contribute to both the research projects your individual ones but also those group projects so it's another key strength of the of the department here if you would like a little taste of the course you can look up this small video which will be on our department web page uh an introduction to a magnetic resonance imaging with uh professor caron schmueli who is our our MRI lecture in the department very interesting uh lecture i'd recommend you have a look at that but if you also want to know on a on a relatively easy level there's some examples of different types of research being done then i'd recommend uh the department's podcast called rungon's radio named after wilhelm rungon who was the discoverer and well the first person to identify x-rays um where it's an interview where with an academic each each uh each month where that goes into some of the details of research being done and some of our team uh in the post graduates have been on this and and you can listen to them talk about their research so look up rungon's radio available on uh uh apple podcast and soundcloud so what's a typical study week like for you ucl well generally on the master's programs you'll have around 12 to 16 hours of lectures per week then you're expected to spend around 10 to 15 hours of time studying on your on your research projects your individual projects so you can see that what a large percentage of work we expect you to put into your research projects you'll also have depending on the module some problem based learning classes where you'll go through specific problems some of them are computing based might be computing labs we call where you can go through given specific problems and get help from our tutors as you study and then you'd also be expected to spend at least an hour a week with either a personal tutor or an academic tutor as part of your research project or otherwise our tutorials and mentoring system where we've got tutor groups which form the same groups actually as the medical device enterprise scenario so hopefully you get to know your tutor group quite well but your personal tutors are there to provide you with pastoral care so if you're having problems throughout the year with perhaps health or if you're struggling with particular personal issues then you can go and speak to them but also they can help plan your future career with you as well because they've got experience and in our subject area and they can talk about what you might need to do if you want to get a clinical position in the future or if you want to get them to research they'll be very helpful from that as well and again the idea is that we like to mix up our our academic backgrounds so that you get lots of different experiences over your studies with us assessments on our programs exams at UCL are all taken in term three which is April and May roughly currently in department if you do have exams there'll be a mix of in person invigilated in exam halls the traditional way but also some modules run online timed exams as well each module generally has a small coursework at least it does vary with the modules most of the engineering of physics modules have a roughly 20 coursework task that you do in year before the exams and but most computing modules I would say tend to be 100 coursework you don't really have timed computing exercises and exams in that in that same way we've spoken a bit about already the different things you can do when you graduate so I won't spend too much time here other than just to highlight that the UCL engineers careers team are really helpful both for students when they're studying you can go and talk to them and find out what you need to do to improve your CV they can find you jobs they can find you specific areas if you're still looking for some specialisms but they also are useful for our graduates so you get to keep using that engineers team engineer careers team up to two years after you've graduated so you know we like to look after our graduates and make sure your careers take off after you studied with us briefly about entry requirements of the course a two one or equivalent in a UK bachelor's degree usually in physics and engineering computer science mathematics or related is generally what's required in some cases with with the very strong applicant for other purposes we might invite you if you've got a two two to a short interview to see if you would be appropriate for the course we generally consider in cases like this for students who've got you know maybe some experience in clinical work in their background or they've got particular expertise that boosts their application beyond their degree results in the undergraduate C so finance for the course you can see here for next year the course fees for UK and overseas students always worth recommending the various finance support you can get here including postgraduate student loans from the UK government but also UCL scholarships which you can apply for these scholarships generally you'll need to apply for quite early I've put on some examples here of the deadlines if you want to apply for next year's fees to have scholarships with these are some of the deadlines for these particular programs the scholarships are usually specific to you as a student there isn't a general department one currently to join the program but if you've got a particular background as a student then you might find that some of these scholarships are ones you can apply for so have a look on the UCL scholarships website to to learn a bit more about that otherwise UCL you know is a is based right in central London so it's a terrific city to live and study in you get access to the student life that of a large university like ours you know large number of sports and cultural and arts clubs there's we're about 10 minutes walk here in Bloomsbury from the west end with all the theatres and all the comedy clubs and various other things you can find experiences the museums in central London we're just north of the British Museum there's lots and lots to do here in London lots of ways you can get involved including the voluntary services units which we recommend that you join the UCL communities and and get involved in some of these activities as much as you can I think we'll leave the frequency ask questions perhaps so a bit to give you a chance to ask some questions as well but uh finally if you'd like to stay in touch I strongly recommend you signing up to some of our social media links we're pretty active and run by Naomi and her communications team on Twitter and various things here where you can see latest pieces of interesting research small videos there's podcast episodes even outside of Runkins radio I know a lot of our teams have been doing more and more to share what they're doing with the wider world so have a look there and you can use this QR code to to look up some of that information as well and I think that's for the moment going to be the end of our slides now we've got a little bit of time here for some questions we've got with us first of all perhaps one of our former students Athena so I wonder if I could just introduce you and perhaps you could give us some perspective on the on on the on the study I'm studying here at UCL as a master student so hi Athena yeah hi could you play perhaps briefly just tell us when you studied with us and what you're up to right now um yeah I can't remember what year it was that I started now I think it was 2021 um that I started I did uh Matt's uh MSE course in medical robotics and AI so I was one of the first cohorts to take it um so I did that absolutely loved it so I decided to stay at UCL um and then I joined one of the CDTs which is a centre for doctoral training and I know we're not talking about PhDs here but um the first year of that um you I did an MRes in medical imaging so I've just finished that and now I've just started a PhD in I guess the broader topic is AI for medical imaging um so yeah that's kind of where I am right now and I've enjoyed it so much that I've been happy to stay for another three years now so yeah could you tell us perhaps what your research project was on when you did your masters because that's what uh when I did my MSE um kind of like what everyone said uh there's quite a lot of like there's a lot of range of research projects that are kind of out there so the module the MSE was medical robotics and AI I did my research project in augmented reality so I was looking at how to get accurate depth perception using different ways of like designing it from colours and lighting um and I quite enjoyed that because that kind of brought in a bit more of a kind of not exactly just robotics and AI but like looking at different aspects of medical technology as well um so it is quite it can be quite broad and I kind of used that as a way to also like get like to clinicians as well so I used I created an experiment and went to surgeons to try and get them to you know test it out and to get my data um so yeah that was quite exciting and I published that as well which was quite quite good as well so I went to a conference last year uh in San Diego which was fun um so yeah I enjoyed it yeah terrific that's really good Lucy how did you find studying in central London like what was the experience like of being in London here I've actually well I've lived in London my whole life um and I'm it's been quite a few years now so I have loved it I did my undergrad um in London as well and yeah London's great um it's got absolutely everything for anyone no matter what your kind of interest is if it's really random or weird or whatever it is like there's always something for you to do in London and like Billy was saying we are in the heart of it all so we're so close to everything um you know even if you don't want to be in like complete central London um you know you're just a short train away to like not exactly central London if you just want to live in a bit of a quiet area you know we're really close to um Regent's Park so like a huge you know green space and everything so I've loved it like there's really good food really good culture good activities to do good places to you know go for a drink as well if you want to say there's there's things for everything um so yeah I've absolutely loved it like no matter what your interest is um so yeah don't be don't think the London's just it's like really crazy busy central London because it's actually just this huge city that kind of has a bit of everything for anyone but I've loved it and we'll stay here probably for the rest of my life so yeah I love it here great that's good to hear yeah um does anyone else on the panel have any questions that they'd like to ask Athena right now perhaps okay great well I think we'll probably go on and look sorry Billy I've got a really quick question, Athena you're the president of the Medtech Society Student Society I wonder if you wanted to give your Student Society a little plug for prospective students to join yeah um I guess similar to what Billy said as well earlier like there are so many societies and clubs that go on UCL like it can be a bit overwhelming um I do remember when I first started I kind of made this a long list of all these societies I want to join and there's so many that there's she's something for everyone um but I guess my interest and why I kind of did the MSc and why I've continued as I love anything around medical technology um we do have a Medtech Society at UCL so I joined it in my very first year when I did my MSc um so I've been on the committee for two years now and because I knew I was staying finally for a whole year I became the president so I'm currently the president of Medtech Society um and I mean I love it because I get to explore like not just like my phd project is more towards AI but it also gives me the opportunity to like explore all the different aspects of other technologies um in medicine as well uh you can do it in other ways as well but um yeah I've organized like conferences speaker events um I've also got like a whole team with me who you know helped me out with it um but yeah I I love it like one of my friends has also made a new society she made like the biopharma society as well so if there is for some reason something that you're not happy like there is there isn't something for you for the societies you can make your own and go with it but it's a really good way to meet people outside of just your like academic group um and make other friends and yeah there's really good volunteering there's really good like you know other any any kind of societies we do a lot of collaborations as well with other ones as well so yeah if you're interested in Medtech Society you're more than welcome to speak to me about it or any other things I'm sure I can help you out with that. I wonder perhaps maybe you could drop the Instagram link in the chat in case any of the attendees wanted to have a look at the Instagram page. Yeah sure I'll do that now. Great yeah and we we really encourage you know I'll ask the students in particular because you've got a full year with us to get involved with the societies in department as well as opportunities and we we want you to grab it with both hands you know generally the students are very you know you're all very hardworking and very keen and that's what we like to encourage. I'll quickly go through some of the questions that people have asked uh as fast as we can here so I've noticed um there's one question here that says if I want to work at the NHS as a medical physicist would I attend this course of study on my own or would the NHS provide me with it? There's a couple of options here commonly so to become a hospital medical physicist you require a training to become registered as a clinical scientist you need to have done a master's degree and completed a number of competences competencies on the job in whatever the specialty that you're looking at so that might be dosimetry radiation therapy planning um so some students will go on to the specific scheme that the NHS provide which is called the STP scheme scientific training program um where you can they will provide it for you and you can study a master's with them or you can do it beforehand those there are a few places on that and um each year and so having a master's is becoming more and more important to be able to apply for those the deadline for this year's has passed already now it was last week um so it's a lot of our students on the master's do our masters and then go to that STP scheme that's pretty common but perhaps more and more common these days is what's called route two which is what Rob mentioned which is where the hospital hires you in a trainee position and they will give you the competences that you need now sometimes they hire those people without masters already and and they might support you to do a master's part time which is a lot of our distance learning students do or um you might have students who who um who yeah who've already gotten masters they they use their masters to get one of those positions and we we know we forward job applications opportunities to our students because they'll often come to us and ask are we looking for a graduate from your program you got an E right now and so that's another way around it so it will the NHS provide it there's options in both directions basically but given the competitive nature of it it's sometimes helpful to do a master's first um prerequisites I saw two questions on prerequisites so we mentioned that two one is the UK equivalent if you go to our department website with the application process on the prospectus you can click on international equivalences to find out what european equivalences of a two one in our subjects areas are or even the us us star ones as well I'd be confident if you said that you are majoring in computing and minoring in physics you would be you would be considered a possible transition into our radiation physics msc yeah that would be considered enough so um that's just something to say there um by the way what's the cohort size for the respective master's courses last year so I guess this year we can talk about it so um the physics and engineering and medicine the both programs together is about 40 uh this year it's roughly 10 on each of the AI programs and the M res about another 10 is pretty typical distance learning about 20 um next year we've been asked you know it's possible there might be some more places available as well so roughly as I said it's about 70 or 80 in total with it with everyone else together but that might move up a little bit um this year so it's a relatively small cohort and you can see all the academics here that lead them you get a bit more personal attention that way which is a positive um anyone else on the panel I haven't been following the chat I'm afraid because I had to keep the screen up but are there any questions here that I've missed so far um do any companies provide a graduate training scheme for medical robotics Matt are you able to answer anything on that right now I'm about to type and I think the short answer is not that I'm aware of so most people with a masters uh or or via a phd would end up going to a company typically as a staff scientist or a staff engineer I guess these are quite specialized positions really uh so I'm not aware of companies that run big graduate training programs yeah it's a relatively new area as well it's worth saying so these might be developing and you know similarly if we hear opportunities in department about these things we do forward them to our students so uh that's always worth considering um uh professor I'm not sure which course would be ideal for robotic surgery because I'm interested in robotic surgery in clinical robotic surgery should they take medical robotics or medical physics um yeah there are different streams to this Matt might be able to say here as well but um it sort of depends slightly on your background if you're an engineer or physics type and you've not done much computing before then you might be more suited on our medical physics or the specifically probably the biomedical engineering roots of the msc and physics and engineering and medicine but if you're more clinical if you're more computer science got some more experience in coding and you're interested in sort of these ai software applications of this stuff then then probably the medical robotics and ai program might be more suitable to you because that has a stronger computer focus but Matt do you have any additions to that I'd have said just quickly go back to the the web page the prospectus is I think just at a really high level the medical physics is is studying more medical imaging and you know the physics of how you create the images right yeah whereas the medical robotics and ai is you know covers some of our the core computing uh it's core robotics modules from the computer science department um and it's it's much more about yeah robotics and ai so given those two choices I'd have probably said the robotics and ai one right and then I know we're over running here but I'll just try and answer these last few questions I have a bsc medical imaging radiography radiological sciences and I'm looking to apply for an msc ai medical imaging does this qualify as our related courses um it would potentially but uh Andre might be able to speak about the specifics here so what are you looking for Andre uh in the medical imaging and ai um yeah so typically expect people to have a good math background because there's a lot of math to go through when you work with machine learning um and also programming experience as some sort of formal program experience I mean also if you don't have a course I mean if you have a github page where you showcase your projects that is definitely helpful so it's it's those things because getting through the program requires you to program quite a bit and you know following all all the math bits so um it sounds you know that this would be considered yeah great thank you um scrolling back oh yeah I think a lot of these questions have been answered already that's great thanks for those that answered in the chat earlier okay well in that case I think we'll bring the session to an end today but if you've got further questions and you want to ask us about it then you can email our department website or us individually and you can find a well we'll reply pretty quickly to a lot of these questions and uh you can get the feedback that you need to make your decisions on whether to apply for the programs or not so um thank you all for attending and thank you for the panel for answering the questions so well and Athena and um I hope to see you all next year thanks Naomi can you stop the recording