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Closing date: 22 June 2021

The National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) Applied Research Collaboration (ARC) for the North East and North Cumbria (NENC) is offering a 3 year full time doctoral fellowship hosted by the Newcastle University Stroke Research Group and the NIHR Newcastle MedTech and In vitro diagnostics Co-operative (MIC).

Can a machine learning algorithm help ambulance staff assess patients with suspected stroke?

This work addresses an important question for patients, clinicians and healthcare systems. Stroke is a medical emergency where accurate and rapid interpretation of information is needed to give patients the best care.

The main purpose of this PhD is to examine whether machine-learning processing of demographic and health information collected by paramedics assessing patients with suspected stroke can improve the early identification of subgroups needing different emergency treatments. Using large datasets from previous clinical studies, further analysis will examine interactions between clinical information and additional biomarkers to consider whether identification of important subgroups can be further improved.

There is no portable test to identify stroke, but ongoing studies led by Newcastle University are evaluating the accuracy of new biomarker technologies. The data generated by these studies will enable the combination of biomarker results with clinical information to examine whether further improvements in algorithm performance are possible.

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