Career Prospects

Industry

Industrial interest in medical imaging is perhaps best demonstrated by the current investment of £76M by GSK and Imperial College in a new Clinical Imaging Centre adjacent to the Hammersmith Hospital in London. Imaging in drug discovery has the potential to assess the theuraputic benefits of drugs prior to changes in observable symptoms. With the costs of bringing a drug to market being enormous, extracting relevant information from images can save millions of pounds. GSK is just one of the many pharmaceutical companies using imaging. The UK is particuarly strong in pharma research with many of the large companies having research sites here.

There are a growing number of small to medium sized enterprises in the medical imaging area. In the UK, these include IXICO, Siemens Molecular Imaging, visionRT, Barco , Imorphics, DePuy, Optasia Medical and Medicsight. Of course internationally there are many other opportunities in this expanding area.

The multi-national medical imaging equipment manufacturers such as Philips Medical Systems, Siemens Medical Solutions, Toshiba and GE Healthcare all have medical imaging at the core of their businesses. GE Healthcare now includes the former Amersham International that develop radiopharmaceuticals for applications such as PET imaging.

The harware and software associated with the storage, retrieval and display of hospital images (PACS systems) is a growth industry.

High-level computer languages such as MATLAB, IDL and Mathematica are used extensively by people in the medical imaging community. These companies see medical imaging software as an important market area.

Academic and Charitable Research

The material in the MSc will provide a solid foundation for anyone wanting to persue a PhD in a subject related to medical imaging.

In addition to traditional university-based research, medical image computing is important to research institutes such as the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, the Institute of Cancer Research, the Medical Research Council and the Institute of Child Health.

Healthcare

Computers, medical imaging and image processing occur across many areas of healthcare from basic understanding, through diagnosis, patient management and therapy. The skills and knowledge gained on this MSc are relevant to many of the professions within the healthcare sector. Note this MSc is not IPEM accredited and so does not form part of the standard training for an NHS Medical Physicist. If IPEM accreditation is essential, see the other MSc's offered by the Medical Physics Department.

Career Help

The UCL Graduate School run a workshop on Career Planning and Job Searching for Masters Students.
The UCL Careers Service offers advice on writing a CV.
UCL Careers Service Home Page
University of London Careers Group Home Page
Imageworld vacancies and announcements.

MSc Home Page | Last modified 15 March, 2007.