A Software developer, to bring artificial intelligence into clinical practice

Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI) has a vacancy in the Evolutionary Intelligence group for a talented

Software developer,

to bring artificial intelligence into clinical practice.

Job description
The Evolutionary Intelligence (EI) research group of the Dutch national research institute for mathematics and computer science (CWI, Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica) located in Amsterdam has a vacancy for a software developer, for a total duration of 3 years and 3 months to bring Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques, in particular (combinations of) evolutionary algorithms and (deep) machine learning algorithms, into clinical practice (at Leiden University Medical Center (UMC) and Amsterdam UMC).

CWI closely collaborates with UMCs on innovations in the medical domain along the entire spectrum from algorithmic foundations to clinical integration. CWI is looking for a talented software developer to work on prototype software that translates our novel AI algorithms into easily useable software for clinicians. In particular, the position entails building prototype software for 3 research projects.

The first project, funded by the Dutch Cancer Society (KWF) and company partner Elekta, concerns our award-wining research line on automated internal radiation treatment, i.e., brachytherapy, planning. In a previous project, CWI and Amsterdam UMC have created highly innovative AI technology that is already used in the clinic at Amsterdam UMC for prostate cancer treatment. In the current KWF project, this technology is being advanced and extended to cervical cancer. For our novel approach to brachytherapy to be user-friendly and widely useable, first a well-designed Graphical User Interface (GUI) needs to be developed that is tailored to our AI approach that finds multiple, different, treatment plans for the physician to choose from. Second, the software needs to be made compatible with certain data format standards to allow easy integration in the current clinical workflow. Moreover, the development of the GUI, linked to the treatment planning optimization, needs to be done according to European Medical Device Regulations (MDR), i.e., self-developed medical software should comply to general safety and performance demands, which are documented in a quality-management system.

The second project, funded by the Dutch Research Council (NWO) and company partners Elekta and Ortec Logiqcare, concerns a novel research line on decentralized architecture search for deep learning, leveraging evolutionary algorithms, mainly for medical image analysis purposes. The goal of the software developer is to create a prototype implementation of the resulting technology that is MDR compliant, allowing results to safely and directly be used in the clinic. Different from the first project, the tasks pertaining to this project will thus be more less on the side of user interaction.

The third project, funded by NWO and company partners Elekta and Xomnia, concerns novel AI technologies for the deformable alignment of medical images (commonly known as deformable image registration). The goal here is a combination of the two projects above in that a GUI needs to be designed that makes it intuitive for a user to interact with our AI technology that proposes multiple solutions, as well as ensuring that the underlying algorithms (of which we have multiple types in this project) are implemented in a unified way.

The three projects of which this position is a part, are closely related and additionally consist of a total of 9 Ph.D. students and 2 part-time Radiation Therapy Technologists (RTTs), most of whom focus on the technological AI side, but all of whom have interactions with clinicians and medical physicists to discuss the underlying problems and data. All Ph.D. students and RTTs are intended to collaborate, also with the software developer. Moreover, the EI group at CWI has a dedicated software engineer who will also be involved in all these projects and will serve as the daily supervisor of the software developer.