PhD Studentship: PhD Opportunity Title An efficient medical Vision Language Models (VLM) for medical applications [Artificial Intelligence, Computer Vision, Medical Imaging, Digital Healthcare] – PhD in Computer Science (PhD Funded, student worldwide)

Project Description:

Large Language Models (LLMs) like GPT-4 have demonstrated remarkable abilities in a variety of healthcare tasks, including diagnosis, patient management, and treatment planning. Specialized models like Med-PaLM 2 also provides advanced capabilities in processing and understanding medical language. However, despite these advancements, these models still face considerable limitations in the healthcare domain, particularly in tasks such as medical visual question answering (VQA) for disease diagnosis and understanding. This challenge is largely due to the diversity of medical data modalities, the intricacy of medical reports. While vision language models VLMs (LLaVA-med) have made progress in addressing these challenges, the high resource requirements highlight a pressing need to develop techniques that optimize their efficiency, making the model viable for real-time clinical applications with limited resources.

The studentship will be awarded on the basis of merit for 3.5 years of full-time study to commence on 1 March 2025. International applicants need to be aware that you will have to cover the cost of your student visa, healthcare surcharge and other costs of moving to the UK to do a PhD.

• Applicants for this studentship must have obtained, or be about to obtain, a First or Upper Second Class UK Honours degree, or the equivalent qualifications gained outside the UK, in an appropriate area of science or technology.
• Possess a strong academic background, ideally with a bachelor's degree in computer science, statistics, physics, engineering, or a related field.
• Have practical experience working on AI for healthcare projects, utilizing PyTorch and/or TensorFlow libraries.
• Exhibit proficiency in programming languages such as Python, C++, C, or Java.
• Preference will be given to candidates with prior experience in presenting or preparing scientific manuscripts for publication in journals or conferences.
• Evidence of ability to engage in scientific research and to work collaboratively as part of a team, including excellent communication skills in both written and spoken English, is required.
• If English is not your first language you will need to meet the required level as per our guidance at https://www.exeter.ac.uk/pg-research/apply/english/

In the application process you will be asked to upload several documents.

• CV
• Letter of application (outlining your academic interests, prior research experience and reasons for wishing to undertake the project).
• Transcript(s) giving full details of subjects studied and grades/marks obtained (this should be an interim transcript if you are still studying)
• Two references from referees familiar with your academic work. If your referees prefer, they can email the reference direct to PGRApplicants@exeter.ac.uk quoting the studentship reference number.
• If you are not a national of a majority English-speaking country you will need to submit evidence of your proficiency in English.

The closing date for applications is midnight on 24th November 2024. Interviews will be held virtually on the MS Teams/Zoom in the week commencing 9th December 2024.

If you have any general enquiries about the application process please email PGRApplicants@exeter.ac.uk or phone 0300 555 60 60 (UK callers) / +44 (0) 1392 723044 (EU/International callers).

Project-specific queries should be directed to the main supervisor.

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