PhD Position in Medical Image Perception Italy-UK

March 5, 2008

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PhD Position in Medical Image Perception

Dept. of Computing, University of Verona, Italy and
Dept. of Computing, Imperial College, London, UK

Applications are invited for a PhD position in the field of medical image perception at the Dept. of Computing of the University of Verona (Italy). The project will be performed in collaboration with the Dept. of Computing of the Imperial College, London, under the joint supervision of Prof. G. Menegaz (Univ. of Verona) and Prof. G. Z. Yang (Imperial College). To this end, the PhD candidate will spend 10 months at the Imperial College.

The position is for three years full time officially starting in Jan. 2009 and it is funded by the Italian Ministry of University and Research (MiUR). However, an earlier date could eventually be agreed upon request.

The salary is 1100 euros/month and will be increased by 50% during the stay in London.

The research activity is in the field of medical image perception, which aims at integrating human perception in the design of automatic systems for the analysis and interpretation of medical images. A more detailed description is given below.

HOW TO APPLY

Applications including the CV, a motivation letter and the names of two references must be sent to Prof. G. Menegaz (gloria.menegaz@univr.it). The closing date for applications is April 30, 2008 but applications from outstanding candidates coming in at a later date will be also considered.

ABSTRACT

The main limitation of the classical medical image processing approach is that the “semantic content” of the images as it is “captured” by the medical doctors is not accounted for. This depends on the expertise of the specialist and determines the way the data are “interpreted”. The exploitation of such knowledge in an automatic system would lead to a dramatic improvement in the performance in many applications, ranging from Computer Aided Diagnosis (CAD) to Minimally Invasive Surgery (MIS) and interventional modeling. The growing awareness of the potential of such an approach led to creation of the novel field of Medical Image Perception (MIP), whose goal are the understanding and modeling of the perceptual and cognitive factors that underlie the interpretation of medical images, as well as the development of an ad-hoc statistical framework for the analysis of the collected data.
The objective of this project is to develop such a methodology by focusing on specific case studies of clinical relevance.
Among the different possibilities, of particular interest are the use of stereo and other advanced 3D displays in MIS. Dealing with this kind of images and image sequences raises many perceptual and computational issues. Understanding the vision mechanisms that rule out stereo vision of colour dynamic sequences and identifying the features that capture the attention of the specialist in performing a certain task (for instance by means of an eye tracker) will allow to substantially improve the perceived quality of the rendered data and thus the overall performance on the task at hand from a medical point of view, leading to an improvement of the quality of life.

Scholarship Tags: Image, Italy, medical, Perception, PhD, Position, UK