PhD candidate - Machine Learning Applications in Biomedicine (Antwerp, Belgium): Data fusion methods for personalized medicine
Description:
Nowadays, tremendous amounts of data are electronically available at hospitals in the form of monitoring data, medical records, lab results, and various other sources such as genomic, transcriptomic, … data (so called ‘omics). While the availability of these data allows for more and more personalize treatments (4P medicine), it also becomes increasingly more difficult to integrate these heterogeneous datasets and to build predictive models.
biomina, the biomedical informatics research center Antwerp (www.biomina.be) and different departments at the Antwerp University Hospital (Belgium) are therefore looking for enthusiastic PhD students to improve patient diagnosis and treatment by developing new machine techniques for integration of heterogeneous datasets. You will be part of an interdisciplinary research team in a stimulating and dynamic environment.
At the critical care and neurosurgery departments, millions of datapoints (such as blood pressure, heart rate, medication, lab values, imaging, …) are gathered daily. Good decision-making is essential: small changes in a patient’s condition can form a frequently unrecognizable pattern forecasting complications and improved patient classification systems can further personalize treatments. Due to the huge amount of data in these environments, automated machine learning techniques are required to facilitate appropriate and timely decision making in emergent situations.
This project aims to integrate different sources of information and to discover patterns of diagnosis, co-morbidity, small or more pronounced changes in the vital parameters or the evolution of lab tests for predicting the evolution of patients and their outcome. The ultimate goal is to improve overall treatment quality, reduce mortality and increase hospital efficiency by developing novel machine learning and data fusion techniques for medical decision support.
Profile:
Preferably, the candidate should:
- have a PhD/MSc in engineering, computer science, mathematics, or in a related field of study
- be an independent problem solver and work result-driven
- have experience with machine learning, data mining, and statistics
- be ambitious in research and problem solving
- have experience of software development
- have less than 6 months of prior work experience and be an EU citizen (an IWT grant requirement)
- have excellent grades
- have fluent written and oral skills in English (Dutch is an asset)
Interested?
Apply by sending an email to Tim Van den Bulcke (tim.van.den.bulcke[ at ]uza.be).
Please include the following documents in your application:
-Motivation letter
-Curriculum Vitae
-Two references letters
Additional links:
www.biomina.be,
www.uza.be,
www.ua.ac.be
Employer:
biomina (biomedical informatics research center Antwerp, www.biomina.be) is a new interdisciplinary research unit for biomedical informatics and established by the University of Antwerpand the Antwerp University Hospitalas part of the Clinical Research Center Antwerp (CRC Antwerp).
Both biological sciences and clinical medicine are currently overwhelmed by vast amounts of complex data, thereby being increasingly dependent on information technology to handle and interpret these datasets. To address these growing needs and to enable new interdisciplinary cross-fertilization, a single research and expertise center was established at the intersection of bioinformatics, medical informatics and translational medicine.
The core research activity is the application of computational techniques for integration and analysis of clinical and ‘omics data. Through its embedding in the University Hospital and by combining fundamental research with innovative prototyping of clinical applications, biomina occupies a unique position within Flanders. The center aims in general to facilitate research and to foster synergies among research groups by offering infrastructure and services within the University of Antwerp / Antwerp University Hospital and to external partners. biomina operates in a dual model through direct participation in research projects and by offering consultancy to research groups for research prototyping, bioinformatics and medical informatics.
