• Developing a new ultrasound imaging system for breast cancer diagnosis that has the potential to provide a standardised high quality image without the need for highly skilled operators that has the added advantage of being less uncomfortable, and lower cost, with no side effects. Breast cancer is the most common cancer in the UK with 62,000 women being diagnosed each year[6]. Current diagnosis relies on uncomfortable X-ray mammography, followed up by biopsy. Of all the lesions investigated, around 30% result in a malignant diagnosis meaning 70% of investigations are unnecessary. Conventional mammograms are less likely to detect breast cancer in younger or Asian populations, who have denser breast tissue. NPL is developing an ultrasound screening platform, currently undergoing clinical demonstration. This doesn't use X-rays (so the patient isn't exposed to radiation) and the screening is carried out with the breast submerged in warm water, without compression, which is a more comfortable experience for the patient. Its capability to better differentiate tissue properties should then ensure more accurate diagnosis.

• NPL plays a key role in ensuring the safe and improved uptake of new radiotherapy techniques helping to ensure that new innovations in treatment provide the better patient outcomes that they promise. The UK has been slower to adopt new high energy proton beam therapy (PBT) than other countries; however, cutting edge technology is now being adopted across both NHS and private centres in the UK. Adopting it later than other countries means we have more work to do in ensuring its best use here. To help meet this challenge, NPL has established a physics research consortium with members from NHS centres and academia and is running regular workshops aimed at promoting research collaborations within the UK. NPL is also contributing to a code of practice that will be the world's first written specifically for PBT based on a proton beam calibration. This will allow centres to calibrate their beams more accurately, so they know with more certainty how much radiation dose they are giving each patient, reducing side effects and increasing treatment effectiveness.


• Harnessing big data to improve our understanding of epidemics. NPL is working with the Royal College of General Practitioners' Research and Surveillance Centre (RCGP RSC) network to provide more accurate surveillance of diseases and epidemics in the UK, such as influenza. The network has been running for 50 years and uses patient records to identify incident rates – the system was vital in understanding and responding to the swine flu epidemic in 2009. Medical records are not always accurate, and NPL is bringing its data mining expertise to address this, helping to improve retrospective data to better identify trends, and assess the efficacy of treatments. NPL is also developing data standards, to ensure the integrity of data, to accelerate its use in critical applications like healthcare and drug development, and ease the integration of non-medical datasets, such as those from wearable devices, into a clinical setting.

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