Imaging is a clear strength of the Turku region, as exemplified by high-level imaging units such as the PET Center (biomedical imaging), the Turku Cell Imaging Center (biological imaging), and Turku BioImaging (image analysis). Turku is home to the international headquarters of Euro-BioImaging, and Euro-BioImaging Finlandia—the only flagship infrastructure managed from Turku and one of Finland’s largest research infrastructures (with 7 universities and 3 university hospitals as members)—is led from Turku.
Turku University of Applied Sciences brings applied AI expertise to the imaging theme, particularly in the research areas of computer vision, image analysis, and federated learning, and supports close and innovative collaboration with companies in the field. Business Turku, in turn, supports the imaging theme at Health Campus Turku by serving as an active interface between the business sector and research activities. Its role is to identify business-driven needs and development opportunities, as well as to promote their integration into research, development, and innovation activities. Turku also has a long history of imaging innovations, including Nobel Prize-winning achievements, and imaging is highlighted in the new strategy for the Southwest Finland region.
Despite these strengths, there is a great deal of unutilised potential in collaboration among the various stakeholders on campus. The different stakeholders at the Health Campus often operate in relative isolation from one another and may not know enough about each other to collaborate effectively. The same applies to industry collaboration, which additionally requires dedicated resources to establish partnerships and significant effort to raise awareness of available opportunities.
The imaging theme focuses on developing the interdisciplinary application of imaging and RDI collaboration among the various actors within the Health Campus, as well as more broadly with the business sector. The primary goal is to address the rigidity, slowness, and limited scale of RDI collaboration within the Health Campus and between the campus and industry. The solution is intended to be broadly directed at all campus stakeholders and the Southwest Finland region. Another objective is to increase students’ knowledge through education on the possibilities of imaging and AI solutions.
The theme is coordinated by Turku BioImaging, which has experience in both the interdisciplinary application of imaging (e.g., the use of image analysis in Baltic Sea research) and RDI collaboration (e.g., the Pix4Business project).