Supervisor: Dr Andrew French, Computer Science
External party: The Rosalind Franklin Institute
High resolution 3D imaging of cells is becoming more mainstream in the biological community due to the increased availability of high-quality electron microscopes, and a growing number of Nano-focus X-ray sources becoming accessible around the world.
The Rosalind Franklin Institute is one such group who is driving forward these developments to increase the both the size and resolution of the resulting datasets, as well as decrease the complexity and time taken to collect them. With these data enhancements, there comes the exacerbation of an already significant problem: that of detailed data analysis. It can take months for a research scientist to manually analyse one dataset collected via one of these machines currently, whilst in comparison actual image capture takes significantly less than an hour in most cases. With next generation machines planned to create an order of magnitude more data, this problem intensifies.
The University of Nottingham's Computer Vision Lab has worked with Diamond Light Source in the past to attempt to address some of these problems, with the very effective SuRVoS software application, which reduces the time for a researcher to analyse their data from weeks to days. And this research continues with collaborations between Diamond and the Franklin.
This project offers a unique opportunity to aid biomedical researchers around the world by automating this process further, investigating the advances in deep-learning and machine vision methods and how they can be applied as effectively as possible to this challenging, but scientifically relevant data.
Standard PhD entry requirements
This is a fully funded opportunity for a Home student and includes a stipend of (minimum) £15,009 per year.
Applications to be informally made direct to the division/supervisor first.
Post interview, application to be made through the MyNottingham system stating the supervisor name and project title
Andrew French [email protected]