Vacancies

Research Associate - Diarrhoea diagnostic device: from bench to bedside

£26,391 - £27,999

Fixed Term for 2 years.

This exciting project is a collaboration that crosses disciplinary and Institutional boundaries. You will be working with experts in both life-sciences and signal processing from both Universities in Bristol to make significant strides forward in a challenging area of healthcare.

Clostridium difficile is a global problem that afflicts over 50,000 people annually in England and Wales and costs Europe €3 billion/year. Rapid diagnosis would assist therapy, facilitate recovery and save money.

We have already shown that the gas emitted from stool changes in the presence of gastrointestinal disease. The work culminated in the building of two prototype medical devices that respond to such gases. We will now refine one of these devices. Our ultimate goal is to prepare a validated device that is ready for commercialisation and that will fundamentally improve the care and treatment of patients through rapid, reliable diagnosis.

The task to be fulfilled in this post is to provide accurate classification of ‘signatures’ emanating from the sensors of emitted volatile compounds. The raw data will need to be processed appropriately, so as to maximise the information content required for classification. Work already carried out indicates that time-frequency techniques, such as Fourier transformation combined with Wavelet transformation, will be essential parts of the signal processing stages. Classification of the patterns embedded in the processed data could be conducted using a range of classical and more recent algorithms.

PhD Student: Haptics for tele-surgery and tele-palpation

There is a need for surgeons and clinicians to be able to ‘feel’ body organs remotely. Although progress in developing robot-assisted surgical systems has been very promising, e.g., the ‘da Vinci Surgical System’, it is currently severely compromised by lack of haptic feedback to the surgeon/clinician. Haptic feedback is currently a very valuable sensory modality for assessing disease involvement of organs and its boundaries.

To incorporate a sense of touch in assistive robotic devices, we must include elements that are capable of providing high-resolution tactile sensing and, importantly, a means of transferring that sensation to the surgeon or clinician. The successful candidate will be working with BRL-based experts from the Universities of the West of England and Bristol, as well as surgeons and clinicians at the Bristol Urological Institute and University Hospitals Bristol, with an emphasis on body palpation and soft organ surgery (e.g. prostate and breast).

The main aim of the project will be to develop an advanced tele-operation system, in which the end effectors (slave system) incorporate high-resolution tactile sensors, and this provides multipoint information about object surfaces. The haptic interface (master system) will incorporate stimulator arrays that deliver this information by ‘virtual touch’ to the surgeon/clinician.

For UK and EU applicants, student registration fees will be paid from the project funds. Overseas applicants will normally be required to fund the difference between the UK/EU registration fee, and the overseas fee, themselves. A UK tax-exempt support bursary of £13,290 per annum will be available to the successful candidate.

General information about the hosting laboratory can be found on this site. For an informal discussion about the post please contact: Tony Pipe.

A likely start date for the successful candidate will be during February or March 2010, dependent on candidate's availability.

PhD Student: Virtual physical modelling for tele-palpation

Existing tomographic techniques, such as CT-scanning, can give information about the structure of parts of a human body. Examples include the liver, kidney, prostate and breast, where search for unusual soft-tissue growth is clearly an important process currently requiring considerable expertise and experience.

The successful candidate will work with BRL-based experts from the Universities of the West of England and Bristol and surgeons and clinicians at the University hospitals Bristol and the Bristol Urological Institute to create a 3-D model of a part of a human body. This model will include physical descriptions of important 3-D distributed properties, such as Young’s Modulus, coefficient of friction and Poisson-ratio. In this way, we will create a virtual 3-D physical representation of parts of the body. This model can then be ‘manipulated’ in a virtual sense using a mechatronic haptic interface to give the clinician/surgeon the impression and sensation of palpating real tissues. The techniques to be developed here will have crucial importance for both remote analysis of symptoms and for medical training.

General information about the hosting laboratory can be found on this site. For an informal discussion about the post please contact: Tony Pipe.

A likely start date for the successful candidate will be during February or March 2010, dependent on candidate's availability.

PhD Student: Control of Lightweight Pliant Plant

Most traditional robots, with their electric motor actuators linked by rigid limbs, have severe limitations for the upcoming ‘revolution’ in human-assistive robotics, wherein humans and robots will be working together in close proximity. In this exciting new robotics application domain, these traditional solutions will simply not work. This is because a traditional-style robot that can both move fast enough and be powerful enough to be useful in cooperative tasks with humans, is also too heavy and dangerous to be used near a human being. The search is on for compliant, light-weight actuators; Electro-Active Polymers (EAPs) and Dielectric Elastomer Polymers (DEAs) are very promising new technologies in this respect. EAPs and DEAs have the added advantage that it may also be possible to operate them in a mode in which position sensing comes as an integral part of the actuator. However, these new materials are notoriously difficult to control, and we need to investigate advanced control techniques.

The successful candidate will be working with BRL-based soft-robotics and control experts from the Universities of the West of England and Bristol, and specialists at the University of Auckland (New Zealand), to create a light-weight actuator system that is suitable for new application domains in human-assistive robotics and perhaps other exciting application such as lightweight swimming robots. A range of advanced techniques will be investigated, from classical control, to a biologically-plausible approach based on the mammalian cerebellum.

General information about the hosting laboratory can be found on this site. For an informal discussion about the post please contact: Tony Pipe.