Fwd: Two PhD positions at Gothenburg University, Sweden

We are pleased to announce two PhD studentships in medical imaging: Experimental neuroimaging with Focal MEG Type of employment: Fixed-term employment, 4 years if full-time studies Extent: 100 % Location: Sahlgrenska Academy, Göteborg First day of employment: As agreed Reference number: UR 2014/16 http://www.gu.se/english/about_the_university/announcements-in-the-job-appl… This project targets stress-induced heart disease (SIHD) with an experimental neuroimaging technique: Focal MEG. The PhD student will be involved in the planning and execution of medical research studies that explore the neurophysiological signaling pathways responsible for the spectrum of responses to arousal we have observed in the general population. These arousal responses are rapid—occuring in less than a heartbeat—and strongly correlated with long-term trends in blood pressure and heart disease. State-of-the-art MEG—like the recently installed NatMEG system to which the student will have access—adds the time-dimension to neuroimaging, allowing one to see where, when, and how long brain activity occurs. Our experimental Focal MEG system improves the sensitivity of MEG; this project will help develop and validate this beyond state-of-the-art neurimaging system. Participants in the studies will be recruited from ongo ing studies that are presently led by the supervisory team at the SUH Department of Clinical Neurophysiology. By combining next-gen neuroimaging with groups of subjects that have been well characterized in ongoing studies, we hope to identify a biomarker for SIHD. The PhD student will thus have access to a unique research infrastructure (NatMEG, Focal MEG, as well as standard fMRI, EEG, ECG, etc.) and be supervised by leading clinical and experimental researchers. Not only will the finished PhD be well educated, but he/she will have a solid foundation for a career in testing clinical issues in experimental environments. When this project is completed, we hope to have identified clinically relevant and non-invasive markers that lead to a better understanding of the underlying physiological mechanisms for SIHD. /This PhD position is funded via doctoral grant during the first year and doctoral studentship during the last three years, and leads to a doctoral degree./ Automatic lesion detection in brain images Type of employment: Fixed-term employment, 4 years if full-time studies Extent: 100 % Location: Sahlgrenska Academy, Göteborg First day of employment: As agreed Reference number: UR 2014/17 http://www.gu.se/english/about_the_university/announcements-in-the-job-appl… A well-established and validated approach to anatomical image segmentation is to use image registration to propagate anatomical labels from multiple atlases to a target (patient) image. We have developed MAPER, a tool that implements this approach for the segmentation of structural magnetic resonance images of the brain. MAPER is currently the most accurate and robust method for segmenting the whole of the human brain into its constituent structures. We have shown its usefulness in particular for measuring markers of neurodegeneration, for example in Alzheimer's disease. The drawback of atlas-based segmentation methods is that some injuries or disease processes lead to the appearance of focal brain lesions (edema, bleeding, tumours, etc.). These are not normally represented in the atlases, and are therefore frequently mislabelled. Addressing this problem will potentially lead to novel applications of automatic image analysis: decision support in the management of stroke, quantitative monitoring of recovery after head injury or brain surgery, objective evaluation of the changes caused by brain tumours and brain cancer treatment, measurement of disease progression in multiple sclerosis, seizure focus identification in epilepsy, and many others. The goal of this project is to develop the capability of automatically detecting and measuring lesions and to validate it on real-world imaging data that we will access through collaborations with clinical experts in the relevant diseases. /This PhD position is funded via doctoral grant during the first year and doctoral studentship during the last three years, and leads to a doctoral degree. -- / Rolf A Heckemann, MD PhD Professor of Medical Imaging and Image Analysis MedTech West <http://www.medtechwest.se> at Sahlgrenska University Hospital University of Gothenburg Sweden