Dear Colleagues,

[Please, feel free to distribute this message to potential candidates who might be interested.]

Hiring fully-funded PhD Candidate in Swarm Intelligence and Tomographic Reconstruction at the AI and Data Science group at the University of Greenwich.

This scholarship will support the PhD candidate to carry out frontier research in swarm led Tomographic Reconstruction (TR), which is the process of inferring the internal structure of an object from the projected images cast by penetrating radiation. TR plays an essential computational role in all medical imaging procedures (X-Ray CT, PET, MRI, Nuclear Medicine and ultrasound). It also has wide application in industry, science and mathematics. The reconstruction problem is similar to inferring the 3D structure of an object from its shadow or filling a grid of numbers given the row and column sums (a style of Japanese crossword).

The PhD candidate will work under the supervision of Dr. Mohammad Majid al-Rifaie at the University of Greenwich, London. The supervisory team includes Dr. Hooman Oroojeni (University of Greenwich), along with Dr. Tim Blackwell (Goldsmiths University of London) and Dr. Bal Sanghera (Paul Strickland Scanner Centre, Mount Vernon Hospital).

We are looking for an outstanding student to work with the team.

The research will pioneer the development of new class of population-based algorithms tailored for few-view tomographic reconstruction. These techniques include: dispersive flies optimisation (DFO), particle swarm optimisation (PSO) and differential evolution (DE). The aim of the project is to evolve a tomographic reconstruction process founded on swarm intelligence algorithms and capable of clinically acceptable reconstructions. The proposed method will be comparable to conventional techniques for normal images but will surpass conventional techniques for situations where the number of projections is reduced. This work is substantiated by a body of work published by the supervisors.

The short-term objective is to demonstrate feasibility and lay the foundation of a swarm-plausible framework over experimental phantoms such as the clinically important Shepp-Logan phantom and others.

The team's long-term goal is to create a framework capable of reconstructing images from real-world clinical projections under few-view scenarios. This work benefits from the existing literature on swarm intelligence, optimisation in high dimensional search spaces, and traditional and novel techniques in nuclear imaging. The ultimate goal is a reduction in scan time and radioactive exposure.

Deadline for applications: 30 January 2023
Link to the position advert: https://docs.gre.ac.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0018/305541/vcs-fes-08-22-web-advert.pdf

For more information contact : Dr. Mohammad Majid al-Rifaie E-mail: m.alrifaie@...

Kind regards,
Mohammad Majid al-Rifaie, Ph.D

Senior Lecturer in Artificial Intelligence 
School of Computing & Mathematical Sciences
University of Greenwich