###Semi-automated quantification from MR Imaging of gastrointestinal dysfunction in Parkinson’s disease
Project ID: 2228bd1108 (You will need this ID for your application)
Research Theme: Healthcare Technologies
UCL Lead department: Division of Medicine
Lead Supervisor: David Atkinson
Project Summary:
Why this research is important: Gastrointestinal (GI) dysfunction is feature of Parkinson Disease (PD) that can appear before the classic movement and tremor symptoms. The cause is thought to be aggregates of alpha-synuclein protein in the enteric nervous system which can impact on a range of GI motor functions. Being able to measure and quantify these effects may guide individual patient prognosis and help to evaluate the effectiveness of new drug therapies.
Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) can provide both static and cine imaging that have the potential to form the basis for quantifying dysfunction. The Michael J Fox Foundation are funding us to develop faster MR sequences and reconstruction methods. This PhD studentship will investigate new ways of extracting useful information from this data.
Who you will be working with: The project is based in the UCL Centre for Medical Imaging in a team that includes medical imaging scientists, physicists, clinicians and medical statisticians. The Michael J Fox Foundation work is part of a collaboration that includes our SME partner Motilent who develop commercial software for clinical GI analysis.
What you will be doing: You will develop and test software tools for automatically quantifying GI function from MR images of the GI tract, including stomach and colon. The work will include developing methods from computer vision for image segmentation, time series analysis for quantifying motion (spatially, temporally and examining discoordination along the GI tract), and visualisation of the metrics developed.
Who we are looking for: The student should be interested in applying computational imaging and signal processing techniques, along with good software engineering practices, to solve challenges in medical imaging. They will be expected to spend time within clinical environments and handle patient data professionally. There will be opportunities to link with the SME Motilent.