Wellcome EPSRC Centre for Interventional and Surgical Sciences

At the Wellcome/EPSRC Centre for Interventional and Surgical Sciences (WEISS), engineers, clinicians and scientists work together to develop technologies that enable safer and more effective treatments for patients across a wide range of conditions. Created at UCL in 2017, WEISS specialises in the fields of surgical and interventional sciences. The Centre is based at Charles Bell House, a building that brings together researchers from a wide range of departments at UCL, including Medical Physics and Biomedical Engineering, Computer Science and Mechanical Engineering. These academic researchers work in partnership with clinical researchers from areas such as the UCL Division of Surgery & Interventional Sciences, and leading hospitals. This close, interdisciplinary integration allows clinicians to feed in their experiences to inform the direction and design of research, creating engineering solutions with the applications firmly in mind. It helps ensure that innovation is always directed towards patient benefit, also ensuring that patients are involved throughout the entire research process. At WEISS, the research is being developed with a wide range of clinical applications in mind, including cardiovascular, paediatric, ophthalmic, neurological and urological surgical interventions. In particular, the Centre aims to advance engineering sciences in intraoperative imaging and sensing, data fusion and extraction, human-technology interfaces, tissue modelling, interventional instrumentation, and surgical navigation.