The PET Imaging Center at University Hospital North Norway (UNN) has a vacant full-time PhD position for the research project “Virtual Biopsy of Prostate Cancer using PET Imaging and Artificial Intelligence”. The PhD position is for a fixed term of three years.
Prostate cancer (PCa) is the most frequent cancer diagnosed in males in Norway with more than 5000 new cases annually. In clinical practice, prostate-specific antigen blood test (PSA) and MRI followed by ultra-sound-guided biopsies, are used for detection, grading, and treatment decision of PCa. This project aims to replace invasive biopsies in PCa diagnostics, by a non-invasive ”virtual biopsy”. The virtual biopsy model will be based on deep learning and trained with prostate specific membrane antigen (PSMA) PET/MRI data and histopathological results. The benefits of a virtual biopsy model for PCa patients include: elimination of invasive biopsies, full 3D coverage of prostate (opposed to the discrete points of the invasive) and shortened waiting time.
The project is a collaboration between PET Imaging Center at UNN, the Norwegian Centre for Clinical Artificial Intelligence (SPKI) at UNN, the Nuclear Medicine and Radiation Biology research group at UiT, and the SFI Visual Intelligence and Machine Learning Group at UiT.
Read more and apply here.