From November 10- 11 2022, a delegation of centre students and CIs attended the annual Centre for Biotechnologies (CBT) conference at the Queensland University of Technology’s Kelvin Grove campus.

Following the welcome to country presented by our elder-in-residence, Gregory Egert (Uncle Cheg), the conference was officially welcomed by D/Prof. Christopher Barner-Kowollik, the QUT Senior deputy vice-chancellor and vice president of research and Centre Director, Prof. Travis Klein who is also a chef Investigator within our ARC Industrial Transformative Training Centre for Joint Biomechanics.

As CBT are one of our main collaborators when it comes to providing biomedical technology seminars, events, and workshops; we were delighted to be invited to highlight the achievements of the centre from the last 12 months.

On day 1 Centre post-doc Dr. Laith Alzubaidi presented their scientific talk on ‘Deep Transfer Learning for Shoulder Abnormality Detection Using X-ray Images.’ Dr. Alzubaidi provided insight into the application of deep learning ai as a powerful technique to diagnose medical images for faster and more accurate detection of soft tissue and skeletal abnormalities. One of the biggest hurdles to using deep learning algorithms in the field of medical imaging diagnosis is the requirement to use hundreds of thousands of images as training data to ensure accuracy of the algorithm. Dr Alzubaidi demonstrated an increase in accuracy of 99.2% with model training and removal of algorithm biases, a fantastic result showing much promise towards the development of using AI for quicker, more accurate diagnosis.

We also enjoyed seeing the contributions of our affiliate PhD students Mr Alexander Lee-Medland, and Miss Natalia Mühl Castoldi, with their successful poster displays.

On day 2, our Deputy Director Prof Peter Pivonka and postdoctoral fellow Dr Wolbert van den Hoorn presented our research achievements during the ‘ARC Training Centres Session’ as chaired by Prof. Klein. Wolly delved into one of our fascinating projects conducted together with UQ and investigating how the central nervous system controls shoulder muscle function. And Peter highlighted the broad range of scientific fields that come together through our Centre to work together on collectively solving some of the major challenges currently facing industry and clinicians in treating shoulder conditions.

We were in great company presenting alongside fellow Australian Research Council ITTCs ARC Training Centre for M3D Innovation, CTET: Cell & Tissue Engineering Technologies ARC Centre and Australian Cobotics Centre.

Nothing puts a smile on our faces like seeing the team networking and sharing their expertise with colleagues, industry and the wider QUT (Queensland University of Technology) research community. On behalf of the ITTC-JB team, thank-you to the conference organisers for a wonderful event.

(L to R) Miss Laura Meszaros, Ms Maddie McIntyre (Centre Manager), Dr Edmund Pickering Pickering, Mr Alex Lee-Medland, Miss Natalia Mühl Castoldi, Mr Maxence Lavaill, Miss Rosalee Armitage, Mr Corey Miller, and Dr Wolbert van den Hoorn engaging with the Centre for Biomedical Technologies grant winner, HDR, and early career researcher sessions.