What prompted you to get involved in research?

I think it came quite naturally from clinical practice. I’ve always been curious about why we do things in a particular way and whether there might be a better way of doing them. Working in nuclear medicine, particularly as my role developed into reporting and advanced/consultant practice, I became more interested in the evidence behind what we see on imaging and how we can extract more useful information from it.

Research offered a way to explore some of the questions that arise in everyday clinical practice. My particular interest in renal cancer came from seeing the limitations of conventional imaging in confidently characterising some renal masses, and wondering whether molecular imaging could give us additional biological information that CT or MRI alone cannot.

How is the CoR Doctoral Fellowship supporting your research? 

I applied because I wanted to take my research further and develop it into a PhD. The Doctoral Fellowship gives me the support to develop that into a much more substantial programme of research.

The funding is supporting my PhD tuition fees and contributing towards total body PET/CT scanning costs. That means I can investigate whether different PET tracers, quantitative imaging and radiomic features can tell us more about the biology and aggressiveness of renal tumours. The aim is to explore whether imaging could help us characterise these tumours more accurately before treatment.

For me personally, it also provides protected support to develop, which is incredibly important because combining clinical practice with meaningful research can be difficult without dedicated funding.

Can you tell us more about your research? 

My research is looking at whether total-body PET imaging can help us understand more about kidney tumours before a patient undergoes treatment. CT and MRI are very good at showing us what a tumour looks like, including its size and location, but they cannot always tell us what type of tumour it is or how it is likely to behave. This can make it difficult to know whether someone needs treatment straight away or whether their tumour could be safely monitored.

PET imaging uses a small amount of an injected radioactive tracer (dye) to show us what is happening inside the tumour. Different tracers reflect different biological processes, so the aim is to see whether using more than one tracer can give us a better overall picture of the tumour’s behaviour.

For the study, a small group of patients undergoing investigation for a renal tumour will have total-body PET scans alongside their usual clinical care. I will look at how the tracers are taken up by the tumour and compare this with the surrounding kidney tissue. I will also use quantitative image analysis to see whether there are patterns within the PET and CT images that may help distinguish between different tumour types. Where patients go on to have a biopsy or surgery, the imaging findings can then be compared with the final histology.

It is an early feasibility study, so the first step is to see whether the scans and analysis are practical and whether the results show enough promise to take forward into a larger study. In the longer term, I hope this could help clinicians make more informed treatment decisions and reduce unnecessary procedures for patients with less aggressive tumours. 

What impact could your research have on the radiography profession?

I hope there are two levels of impact. The first is the research itself: if we can demonstrate that advanced molecular imaging provides useful information about tumour biology, it could contribute to more personalised imaging and treatment pathways for patients with renal cancer.

And I think there is a wider professional impact as well. As the first radiographer to be accepted to study for a radiology PhD at the University of Cambridge, I want it to help demonstrate that radiographers can lead research and develop new imaging techniques and contribute to the evidence base that shapes patient care. 

I also hope that, by engaging in clinical research at Cambridge, I can help make this pathway more visible and encourage others to follow as the profession continues to evolve. I hope my work contributes in a small way to showing what a radiography career involving research can look like.