£1.6m funding at the interface of statistics, healthcare and manufacturing

Researchers at the University of Warwick have been awarded £1.1 million to develop the statistics needed to pool the vast quantities of data generated by brain scans. The University has also been awarded £500,000 to improve quality control in 3D printing. Both projects are joint between the Department of Statistics and WMG, exploiting the unique strengths of each group. Brain imaging has brought dramatic advances to neuroscience and there are now tens of thousands of academic studies that use neuroimaging data from equipment such as fMRI scanners. To make sense of all of these studies, researchers use a tool known as meta-analysis that combines the findings of many different studies, producing results that are more reliable than any individual study. Brain researchers studying everything from mental disorders to the aging brain depend on meta-analysis to make sense of the sometimes-conflicting literature. The new £1.1 million project, funded by the Wellcome Trust, will develop new and sensitive statistical methods to combine information from fMRI studies.