Post-doc Standardization and Automation of NEuroimaging-QC

MRI-derived neuroimaging biomarkers, such as volumes of brain tissue and lesions, play a major role in the early diagnosis and disease staging of neurological disorders. Image quality is a key determinant of biomarker reliability and, therefore, important for diagnostic quality and delivery of effective patient-centred care. SANE-QC aims to develop automated imaging quality control (QC) strategies by combining physics and AI-based methods and validate their ability to improve the precision and sensitivity of MRI biomarkers for clinical trials.

This project addresses the following challenges of current QC methods:

• Visual rating is the current gold standard, but is time-consuming, only indicates the presence or absence of artifacts, and has inter-observer variability;
• Quality thresholds for approving or rejecting images have not been established;
• Pathology may also influence image quality, possibly leading to inconsistent QC outcomes.

We define three aims:

1. Create a QC strategy that works in multi-scanner and multi-cohort clinical datasets (>30,000 images) that we degrade with simulated MRI artifacts to have a ground truth based on real-world data. We will combine previously developed image QC features by concatenating our methods with those from our partners and publicly-available methods.
2. Establish quality thresholds based on the biologically plausible association of gray matter atrophy with age and disease severity. We will study the bias and variability of these associations in images enriched by our simulated artifacts.
3. Validate clinically the ability of our QC strategy to improve the study power to detect disease measures in patients with Alzheimer’s Disease (AD), multiple sclerosis (MS), and brain tumors. SANE-QC will deliver and validate consensus QC metrics and thresholds for neuroimaging biomarkers, resulting in reliable MRI biomarkers leading to cost-effective and higher quality clinical trials.

As a post-doctoral fellow you will:

• Co-supervise the SANE-QC PhD student on the aims as outlined above.
• Write scientific papers about these findings (in relation to your own research ideas; to be discussed).
• Work together in a local team of scientists and clinicians to make your research relevant to clinical neuroimaging research, both in the AMC and VUmc;
• Collaborate with consortium partners QMENTA and IXICO;
• Engage all consortium members and monitor project progress (together with the PIs);
• Connect with existing international networks on MRI quality and present your findings on international conferences (together with the PIs);
• Write a grant to continue this work.

You are a highly motivated and enthusiastic post-doc with a strong interest and experience in analyzing neuroimaging of brain diseases (including programming). You are proactive and precise, result-oriented, and care about the quality of your work, have excellent (written) English communication skills, and work optimally when collaborating with others. You like to solve scientific problems and have intrinsic motivation and the capacity to continuously improve yourself. In addition, you meet the following requirements and experience:

• A PhD degree in a relevant field, preferably deep learning with medical imaging;
• Extensive experience with programming and image processing;
• Excellent scientific writing skills;
• Preferably experience with (MRI) neuroimaging techniques.

The work requires collaboration with people from multiple disciplines within the medical and technical fields, while your own work will be mostly technical within the neuroimaging field.

You will work in an interdisciplinary team of clinicians and scientists from various departments at the Amsterdam UMC. You will be primarily supervised by Dr Anouk Schrantee and Dr Henk Mutsaerts (department of Radiology and Nuclear Medicine).

While you will be based at the Radiology and Nuclear Medicine department of the Amsterdam UMC, location AMC, your work resides mostly within the Amsterdam Neuroimaging Center which also includes the Alzheimer Center, Multiple Sclerosis Center, and the Brain Tumor Center. Your developments will directly be implemented in our clinical research IT workflow, supervised by clinical IT specialist drs. Paul Groot. You will directly collaborate with the companies IXICO and QMENTA for the relevance of your work in clinical trials.

The departments have many national and international contacts and collaborations and you will have many opportunities to develop yourself into an independent scientist. There is an open, stimulating research atmosphere, labs with state-of-the-art equipment, and fun, enthusiastic and motivated colleagues.