Research Assistant / Associate in Cardiac MRI physics

South Kensington Campus

Research Associate salary range: £45,593 - £53,630 per annum*

Research Assistant salary range: £40,694 - £43,888 per annum

Full-time, Fixed term to start ASAP for up to 4 years

Job Summary

The Computing Department at Imperial College is seeking a highly motivated Research Associate or Research Assistant to participate in the development of novel in-vivo magnetic resonance (MR) imaging and 3D microscopy techniques in the heart, as well as advanced, deep learning approaches for MR post-processing and analysis.

As part of an ongoing research programme at Imperial College London NHLI and Computing, Imperial researchers embedded in the Cardiovascular Magnetic Resonance (CMR) Unit at the Royal Brompton Hospital (RBH), are developing diffusion tensor cardiovascular magnetic resonance (DT-CMR) methods that provide information on the 3-dimensional microstructure of the muscle in the beating heart of patients and healthy volunteers non-invasively. With this new technology, which has already provided novel insights into the microstructural dynamics of cardiac contraction, we aim to improve our understanding of how the healthy heart functions as well as how microstructural dysfunction contributes to disease. This exciting new modality will yield a disruptive reassessment of cardiac function and will have important diagnostic and prognostic value in cardiac disease.

The successful candidate will join a multi-disciplinary team of physicists, computer scientists, cardiologists and technologists embedded within Imperial College and RBH and will be involved in the development of microscopy techniques, in vivo and ex vivo MRI data acquisition, image reconstruction and post-processing techniques, as well as artificial intelligence algorithms to optimise all of the above, under the supervision of Prof Daniel Rueckert (Department of Computing) and Dr Sonia Nielles-Vallespin (NHLI).

Duties and Responsibilities

• Co-develop MRI pulse sequence and reconstruction methods in for in-vivo and ex-vivo imaging of the heart on our Siemens 3T scanner and Bruker preclinical system.
• Co-develop microscopy techniques to image heart tissue.
• Adapt post-processing data analysis methods to extract the additional information encoded into the images originating from the sequence developed above.
• Develop AI algorithms to support the methods above.
• Validate these techniques in phantoms, pre-clinical experiments and healthy volunteers.

Essential requirements

Research Associate level:

• PhD in MRI, or a closely related discipline, or equivalent research, industrial or commercial experience
• Knowledge of research methods and statistical procedures
• Practical experience within a research environment and / or publication in relevant and refereed journals
• Experience in a programming language (C++, MATLAB or Python preferred)
• Experience in developing MRI pulse sequences and/or image reconstruction techniques (ideally with Siemens scanners).
• Experience in scanning phantoms and healthy volunteers.
• Knowledge of AI Computer Vision methods would be desirable but could also be developed during the project.

Research Assistant level:

• A good undergraduate degree or MSc (or their equivalents) in mathematics, physics, or engineering
• Candidates with demonstrable experience in Data Science will be considered.

Please see job description for full list of requirements.

*Candidates who have not yet been officially awarded their PhD will be appointed as Research Assistant within the salary range £40,694 - £43,888 per annum.

How to apply

To apply visit: www.imperial.ac.uk/jobs and search using vacancy reference number ENG03018. In addition to completing the online application candidates should attach:

• A full CV
• A cover letter outlining how your experience meets the above requirements.

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