Donnerstag, 28. November 2013

Samstag, 16. November 2013

530 - Software Engineering Practice and Group project available

The MRI foetus detector

Recently, several novel MRI sequences have been developed to scan a foetuses inside the womb. The resulting 3D scans show, besides the foetus, a significant amount of maternal tissue and are also subject to movement artefacts caused by the foetus. An automatic evaluation of the foetal organs would be desirable but is currently difficult because of the large amount of background information. The aim of this project is to suppress the maternal background information and to easy subsequent processing of pre-natal foetal MRI datasets.

The key objectives of this project are therefore:
- to implement state-of-the-art object detection algorithms, using existing libraries, and to train and evaluate their performance on the individual slices of the 3D datasets.
- to implement an object detector for 3D tubular structures to find the spine of the foetus directly in the volumes and to compare this approach to the slice based approch above.
- to use machine learning for an automatically generated probability map and to visualize the likelihood of foetal tissue.

The project should be implemented in Matlab or C/C++ running on a Desktop PC. Excellent programming skills and experience in image processing and machine learning are desirable.

Mittwoch, 13. November 2013

money rules


Today I got the official confirmation at a PostDoc Development Centre course that basically the only criteria to stay in academia is how much money you bring the university (grants etc). It is actually absolutely not evaluated how good you're in teaching. I would understand this attitude when it comes to Austrian universities, which don't take study fees. However, in UK the study fees are high and still they do not aim for high quality teachers. They only aim for cash cows. Why do the universities all over the world want to follow this system? This is comparable to hiring a bus driver according to her/his ability to motivate customers to get on the bus without checking her/his driving history or driving license. Anyway, if money and prestige are really the only things that matter in academia, then shouldn't they outsource the teaching part completely?

btw: I'll soon post research related stuff again :)