Job description

Spine surgery encompasses a variety of intricate surgeries, all of which aim at improving patients’ activity levels, quality of life, satisfaction with procedures, spine stability, reducing pain and other related symptoms. The purpose of this role is to develop, extract and analyse imaging biomarkers predictive of good surgical outcome.  

Tools such as image segmentation and image registration, will enable to extract relevant information about disk volumes, nerve root canal compression or spine mobility amongst others. They will have to process cross-sectional information as well as longitudinal scans to monitor evolution over time. In addition, these tools will have to be robust to the presence of metal artefact due to implemented hardware such as surgical screws or rods. 

The successful applicant will have access to a large database of retrospective data acquired at Guy’s & St Thomas’ Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust. This includes imaging data: MRI, CT, Xray acquired pre-, intra- and post-surgery, as well as non-imaging information extracted from Electrical Patient Records, radiological read reports and surgical theatre system. They will also be granted access to large external non-imaging database of over 250k patients. 

The post-holder will have the opportunity to work closely with the clinical team as well as with Medtronic, the project funder. 

The successful applicant will have experience in medical image processing using machine learning and non-learning-based approaches for medical image registration and/or segmentation. They will also be knowledgeable in software development using Python and relevant modules such as MONAI, PyTorch. The post-holder will have knowledge in statistical analysis and modelling to extract information from large scale database. 

This post will be offered on an  a fixed-term contract for 2 years 

This is a full-time post

Key responsibilities

•       Development of analytical tools to extract quantitative information from medical images (MRI, CT, Xray, …)  

•       Development of machine learning tool for prognosis. 

•       Perform statistical analyses and modelling on large datasets. 

•       Data curation and organization in a structured infrastructure. 

•       Adhere to project’s milestone deadlines. 

•       Publish methods and findings in international journal. 

•       Actively collaborate will clinical and industrial partners. 

The above list of responsibilities may not be exhaustive, and the post holder will be required to undertake such tasks and responsibilities as may reasonably be expected within the scope and grading of the post.  

Skills, knowledge, and experience 

Essential criteria  

1.       PhD degree in relevant area 

2.       Experience in medical image processing 

3.       Experience in machine learning 

4.       Experience in statistical analysis 

5.       Experience in developing good quality software using Python 

6.       History of publishing research articles in international journals and/or conferences. 

Desirable criteria

1.       Experience in medical image registration. 

2.       Experience in developing machine learning tools using the MONAI framework. 

3.       Experience in working in a multi-disciplinary team.