Twenty PhD students funded within DDLS – one will be employed at Sahlgrenska Academy

HEALTH AND TECHNOLOGY. When the research school for SciLifeLab and Wallenberg’s national program for data-driven life science (DDLS) starts this fall, one of the PhD students will be enrolled at Sahlgrenska Academy.

Christina Jern and her co-applicants will recruit a PhD student for a project on precision medicine for ischemic stroke.

“We will use machine learning algorithms to find blood-based molecular and radiomic biomarkers that will allow us to better predict the prognosis after an ischemic stroke. We study the risk of a new stroke or other major recurrent cardiovascular events as well as functional and neurological outcomes,” says Christina Jern, Professor of Neurology at the Institute of Biomedicine.

The PhD student will start by investigating blood-based biomarkers in the form of RNA and proteins. They will then combine these biomarkers with data from brain magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans to investigate how well the markers can be used to predict patient outcomes.

Validated computational models

Tara Stanne and Björn Andersson at Sahlgrenska Academy will be co-supervisors. Another partner in the project is Markus Schirmer at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, who has developed computational models (known as pipelines) that can be used to obtain different types of quantitative data from brain MRI scans of patients with ischemic stroke such as brain infarct volumes, white matter hyperintensity volumes (a sign of small vessel disease), and connectivity between different regions of the brain.

“We have already contributed to several publications by Markus Schirmer, Natalia Rost and coworkers in Boston in which these pipelines have been validated. The development of these automated methods is very important because the alternative is for a neuroradiologist or another physician with the right skills to review each MRI scan and manually produce this data, which is obviously very labor intensive. The PhD student we now can recruit will be able to use these computational models to analyze MRI scans here at Sahlgrenska Academy under the supervision of Markus Schirmer,” says Tara Stanne.

In this DDLS call a total of twenty PhD positions have been funded for four years, with SEK 3.25 million each. All these PhD positions are to be advertised on May 15. The PhD students will all attend a national DDLS research school. Three more PhD students will have co-supervisors from Sahlgrenska Academy.

The call for applications attracted a high number of applicants, particularly within the field of precision medicine where out of 103 applications, seven PhD projects were awarded. Read more about the twenty funded PhD positions on the SciLifeLab website: https://www.scilifelab.se/data-driven/ddls-research-school/rs-phd-projects/

BY: ELIN LINDSTRÖM