Funded by the Little Princess Trust and administered by CCLG
Lead investigator: Dr John Apps, University of Birmingham
Award: £61,614.00
Awarded September 2026
The challenge
MRI scans are crucial in childhood brain cancer care, from diagnosing tumours to assessing how well treatments are working. Currently, expert radiologists review MRI scans by describing what they see and taking a small number of measurements, often from 2D images. Computers can extract far more information from these scans than the human eye can, giving clearer insights into how a tumour’s size and biology change over time in 3D. However, it is tricky to teach computers to distinguish between tumour and healthy brain.
Recent advances in computing and artificial intelligence (AI) have made this much easier, providing much more detailed information about how tumours respond to treatment. However, most existing AI tools for children’s brain tumours have been trained either on scans taken at diagnosis, not after treatment, or on adult brain tumours, which are very different to childhood tumours.
The project
Dr John Apps’ team at the University of Birmingham has experience in this area and access to a large set of MRI scans donated for research. In this project, the researchers will develop and test AI tools that can automatically identify and analyse children’s tumours on MRI scans at every stage, from diagnosis through treatment to long‑term follow‑up.
They will assess how well different tools work by looking not only at how accurately they find the tumour, but also at the biological information they can extract, and how this compares with expert hand‑drawn measurements. They will work within current clinical standards, so that their AI tools can be more easily adapted into use in hospitals.
The impact
The tools created in this project will help clinicians assess tumours more accurately, both day-to-day and in clinical trials, supporting better decisions for patients and the development of new treatments. Future steps may include testing these tools in hospitals and using them in upcoming brain tumour clinical trials for children and young people.
The Little Princess Trust
This project was funded by The Little Princess Trust. They fund research projects in partnership with CCLG, combining CCLG's research funding and grant management expertise with The Little Princess Trust's fantastic fundraising to support world-class scientific research.