PostDoc Position at IRIT Toulouse

PostDoc Position at IRIT-CNRS Laboratory Toulouse

IAPA Project: Infrastructure to Access, Share and Analyse Biomedical Data

Context:
The IAPA project is funded by the Paul Sabatier University and includes 
the ICR (Institut Claudius Regaud, Hospital and Research Centre 
Institute against Cancer) as a partner.
This project aims at building up a software and hardware infrastructure 
to allow for the cross-correlation of biomedical data coming from very 
diverse sources. The objective is to head for an infrastructure that 
will allow the synthesis and the cross-analysis of patient data in order 
to discover new diagnoses, therapies and treatments against cancer.

Context of the work:
Medical data are from very different nature, coming from heterogeneous 
sources distributed among the territories. An integrated medical system, 
able to find all the possible data for one patient, does still not 
exist. Many obstacles slowed the process: political, ethical, financial 
and informatics problems.
This latter dimension of the problem is at the heart of the project. 
Available data are nowadays numerous, heterogeneous, multimodal, time 
stamped, structured and unstructured,...:
- administrative information about the patients (age, gender, address, ...)
- clinical analysis (blood test, glucose and cholesterol rate, ...)
- regulations and results of therapies
- images from different nature (PET, MRI, X-Ray)
- gene expressions

To sum up the state of medical information, one can see the following: 
The medical practice generates more and more diverse information (text, 
images, video, tables, ...), structured or not, raw data or data coming 
from a analysis process, stored or not in specialized data centres. The 
combination of these data proves however very useful in various fields 
of exercise of medicine (research, learning). Paradoxically, while the 
potentially useful data do not cease growing in quantity as in quality, 
it becomes increasingly difficult, even impossible to control and access 
them as a whole.

PostDoc subject:
The work of this PostDoc will be interested to have a modelling of the 
data available within a common framework, whatever its modality 
(clinical images, data, gene expressions...). Then this modelling will 
allow to build up tools for indexing and searching of data from their 
storage centres.
The objective of this PostDoc is thus to propose solutions making it 
possible to better apprehend the heterogeneity on the level of the 
contents of information (heterogeneity in terms of structure and formats 
of the data) as well as on the level of access methods to these data. 
For this, a proposal is to investigate the problem from 3 different 
axes: First is concerned with the definition of a common reference 
pattern (terminology and ontology) allowing for the description and 
annotation of the data. Second is interested in the description of the 
data themselves (description of the metadata associated with them). 
Finally, last is concerned with the requests to the data, exploiting 
these metadata.
A second part of the PostDoc will be to build algorithms and methods 
making it possible to find correlations between the various data 
available. Data mining techniques will be used in order to highlight the 
links and causalities between facts present in the available data sets. 
The aim is to make appear spontaneously some new knowledge, for instance 
concerning the therapy obtained using identified drugs over some 
(population of) patients. Multidimensional analysis or rule associations 
sets, among others can give some answers to this problematic.

Scientific Background:
1. PhD in Computer Science in the areas of: Data representations, 
ontologies, data indexing, datamining, multimedia
2. Working experience in the field of Medical Informatics, being 
familiar with medical terminologies.
3. Fluency in English. French is a plus.

Duration and Salary:
1. 18 months
2. 2100 euros / months, gross salary

Conditions to apply:
This position is opened to foreign applicants. The conditions are thus:
1. Not being a French citizen
2. Not being more than 35 years old
3. Not having completed a PhD in France
4. Not being employed in a Research centre in France
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Contact :
Prof. Jean-Marc Pierson, pierson at irit.fr
Prof. Mohand Boughanem, bougha at irit.fr

-- 
Prof. Mohand BOUGHANEM
Université Paul Sabatier
IRIT-SIG-RI
118 Route de Narbonne
31062 Toulouse  Cedex 9
Tel: from France: 05.61.55.74.16; from abroad: (+33) 5 61.55.74.16
email:[email protected]
http://www.irit.fr/~Mohand.Boughanem/