Last application date: Nov 13, 2015 00:00
Department: TW05 – Department of Information technology
Contract: Limited duration
Occupancy rate: 100%
Vacancy Type: Research staff
Job description
A hot topic nowadays in cancer diagnosis is the detection of so-called circulating tumour cells (CTCs) in the blood. There exist techniques where a number of blood cells are sent at high speeds through a small capillary (so-called flow-cytometry systems), but in order to identify whether a cell is cancerous or note, people typically fluorescently label them. However, this tends to kill the cells so that they are no longer available for further study. A way around this problem is to use digital holography, where a light beam excites the cell, and the interference pattern of the incident light with the scattered light is recorded on a camera. Typically, the cell geometry is then calculated from this pattern by solving Maxwell’s equation in reverse. However, this is an extremely time-consuming step, which does not lend itself to real-time high-speed detection of cancer cells. We recently developed an alternative method to speed this up. Initial simulation results have been very promising, and now we plan to build upon this to construct a photonic hardware implementation of this network in silicon, in order to really achieve an important classification speedup in practice. Additionally, we still need to exploit many advantages that an all-optical implementation can give us (phase, wavelength, polarisation, …) and this work is an important part of the PhD topic. Also, we need to investigate to what extent recent paradigms from machine learning (reservoir computing, deep learning, …) can play a role in improving performance.
This PhD topic is inherently multidisciplinary, and sits at the interface between photonics and machine learning. Additionally, there is a strong collaboration with a team in imec which effectively fabricates chip-based flow cytometers and which can provide real data. A willingness to tackle challenges coming from these multidisciplinary collaborations is a must.
Profile of the candidate
PhD position at the Photonics Research Group (INTEC-Dept., Ghent University-imec)
How to apply
Apply at: http://photonics.intec.ugent.be/contact/vacancies/Application.htm
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