Postdoc in Biomedical Engineering – C-Arm Fluoroscopy Navigation and Medical Imaging, UBC, Vancouver, Canada

The Centre for Hip Health and Mobility (www.hiphealth.ca/) in association with Vancouver General Hospital (www.vch.ca/) and the University of British Columbia (www.ubc.ca), and in collaboration with the University of Calgary (www.ucalgary.ca), is offering a one-to-three year postdoctoral fellowship to join our team in creating a novel, retrofittable C-arm system to improve accuracy, reduce radiation dose and decrease operating room time for these widely-used intraoperative imaging systems for orthopaedic surgeries. The fellowship is renewable after the first year, contingent on progress and funding. The position is available immediately.

Experience with one or more of the following is considered an asset: medical image analysis, surgical navigation systems, motion tracking systems, statistical shape modeling, calibration, registration, hardware integration and/or software design, and/or C++ programming, together with a strong scientific background (e.g. engineering, physics, imaging or computer science) and excellent oral and written communication skills.

Mobile C-arms are widely used in orthopaedic surgeries, particularly trauma and spine, to locate bones and implants through real-time radiography and fluoroscopy. Together with our commercial partners, we have developed a number of related technologies that, through adding location awareness and navigational support, will enable new surgical approaches and make C-arms more accurate and faster to use, while reducing radiation exposure to the patient and surgical team.

We seek a postdoctoral fellow to: (1) lead the most technically challenging aspects of developing this system, (2) oversee and contribute to integrating the hardware and software components to create a clinically-usable system and a training system, (3) lead testing of the completed systems with users in both a dedicated on-site research laboratory and, when sufficiently developed, in the operating room, and (4) co-supervise student trainees on the project, offering a variety of publication opportunities. A core component, our C-arm tracking system, is described in detail in Amiri et al. 2013 (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24323400).

Our multi-disciplinary team includes two universities (UBC and University of Calgary), three orthopaedic surgeons, three industrial partners, an educational specialist, and a number of master’s and PhD students. The primary technical investigators are: Dr. Antony Hodgson (UBC), Dr. Shahram Amiri (UBC) and Dr. Carolyn Anglin (UCalgary). The salary will be C$42,000, plus comprehensive benefits. If successful in obtaining an external scholarship, a top-up will be provided. The applicant will also be considered for a UBC Engineers in Scrubs PDF award, which will connect the award-holder with a community of graduate students and clinical departments working on technical problems in clinical settings; the next internal deadline for this award is May 15th, 2014.

To apply, send an email with a cover letter, your CV and contact information for 3
references to Dr. Antony Hodgson at ahodgson@mech.ubc.ca.