GPI is looking for a motivated PhD student (March 2020)

We are looking for a motivated student for a PhD candidacy position (3 years funding) at the Image Processing Group at GPI/UPC.

We look for a PhD student candidate that will work in a project in collaboration with expert clinicians from the Melanoma Unit – Dermatology Department at the Hospital Clinic Barcelona, funded by Fundació La Marató de TV3 (PhD position offer)

The project aims to improve the diagnosis, treatment, quality of life and survival of patients with melanoma.

Currently, all melanoma patients are divided into categories depending on the risk of having metastasis and potentially dying from the disease. To classify patients, a method (staging system) is used that includes information on a limited number of tumor characteristics and patient metastases. This information is used to predict the evolution and risk of relapse of the patient and to decide on the follow-up, diagnostic tests and treatment options for each patient. Unfortunately, this method is very inaccurate and many treatments and tests are not adequately indicated.

This project aims to build a precision medicine-oriented method for better guiding clinical management of patients with melanoma, by

  • Identifying clinical, environmental, socio-economic, behavioral, phenotypical, biochemical, pharmacological, genetic and medical imaging data which correlate with the patient’s risk to relapse, metastasize or die on a collaborative database which contains information from 23 different hospitals in Catalonia
  • Creating a survival prediction multimodal Deep Learning algorithm to aggregate the information from a patient into a set of scores to predict disease-free survival and melanoma survival associated risks, and validating results on European melanoma patients from data registries from two International cancer societies
  • Using the model’s outputs to create a new statistically coherent stratification for patients with melanoma and predicting the patient’s outcome under different treatment options

If you are interest in this position, please check this information and submit your complete application or questions related to the position by email to Verónica Vilaplana, with “PhD position-skin” in the email subject, before May 15th 2020