PhD in Healthcare analytics & PhD in Biometrics – Surrey University

PhD in Healthcare analytics
Electronic health records contain a wealth of information that has not been fully exploited. Today, it is possible to retrieve millions of patient records over time, across vendors, and clinical practices. This research project aims to develop a set of statistical tools for processing population-scale health records, that is, in the order of millions of patient records. Although a number of statistical software packages exist, e.g., there is still room for improvement, e.g., designing better algorithms that are capable of handling sampling bias, structural noise, or under-sampled data; handling covariates or confounding factors; exploiting temporal logics; and, efficiently retrieving patient records.The work will concentrate upon novel pattern recognition, machine learning, and data-mining techniques. The student is expected to be able to use or modify existing statistical tools or methodologies in order to solve novel problems posed by healthcare informatics.
To find out more: http://personal.ee.surrey.ac.uk/Personal/Norman.Poh/vacancy.php

PhD in Biometrics
The project addresses the problem of evaluation and testing biometrics systems. The current practice is to evaluate the performance of biometrics systems on standard data sets, using simple criteria, such as misclassification rate, or false positive and false rejections rates. This does not gauge the sensitivity of the systems to various forms of degradation, such as registration errors, illumination problems, noise, focus and motion blur, etc. The aim of the project will be to develop novel performance metrics which will capture the effect of degradations on the system performance. The challenge will be to build models of degradation processes, and to develop techniques for generating realistic synthetic data that could be used for biometric system evaluation. The possibility of calibrating the performance measures by means of synthetic to real data association models will be investigated.
To find out more: http://personal.ee.surrey.ac.uk/Personal/Norman.Poh/vacancy.php