Awesome news for the Finnish inverse problems research community: the Business Finland agency will fund our new research project. It is called Tomography Headquarters, or TomoHQ for short. The idea of TomoHQ is to use mathematics for creating new portable and cost-effective imaging devices for medicine and other application areas. TomoHQ is a three-year project with a possible two-year extension; we will start our work in fall 2026. The project is run by Professor Samuli Siltanen of University of Helsinki and Vice Director, Professor Marko Vauhkonen at University of Eastern Finland. The total budget of TomoHQ is 5.4 million euros.
Traditionally, the design of tomographic scanners is based on building huge machines that produce accurate data for specific mathematical formulas. In case of X-ray CT the math comes from the Radon transform, and MRI is based on the Fourier transform. To follow the mathematical requirements closely, the scanners need to be big, heavy and expensive.
TomoHQ turns this thinking around. We let the devices be small, portable and less accurate. Then the data will be crooked in some way; for example in low-field MRI the magnetic field lines bend, and then the standard Fourier transform cannot be applied anymore. The following video demonstrates the effect of bending lines on linear X-ray tomography.
In TomoHQ, we compensate for the shortcomings of data by using modern inventions of the mathematics of inverse problems. Here are some of the applications we plan to work on:
- Portable low-field MRI for medicine and nondestructive testing
- Electrical impedance tomography (EIT) for monitoring stroke patients
- Passive gamma-ray emission tomography for inspection of spent nuclear fuel
- X-ray phase-contrast mammography
- Hyperspectral imaging of atmospheric composition
- Doppler-LIDAR for environmental monitoring
- EIT for breast, skin and soft tissue cancers
The TomoHQ team is located at six sites all over Finland.
