About the project
Multiple sclerosis progresses differently in every patient, and knowing who is likely to decline fastest could change their care. This project will develop machine learning methods that forecast disability progression with reliable, guaranteed uncertainty, built on conformal prediction and shaped with neurologists at University Hospital Southampton.
Multiple sclerosis (MS) affects more than 150,000 people in the UK, and no two patients follow the same course. Machine learning can forecast disability from clinical scores, MRI and wearable activity data, but a forecast only helps if a clinician knows how far to trust it for that particular patient.
Conformal prediction attaches a range to each forecast that is guaranteed to contain the true outcome at a chosen rate, without assuming the model is correct. Our recent work on a Southampton MS cohort showed that this guarantee can hold on average while hiding which patients are missed.
You will:
- develop conformal methods whose guarantees hold for clinically meaningful groups of patients, not only on average
- adapt them to the realities of clinical data: small cohorts, several data types, and repeated visits over time
- test whether findings replicate across hospitals and in large clinical trial datasets
- work with neurologists to turn uncertainty estimates into information that supports monitoring and treatment decisions
The project combines new methodology with clinical impact, and is part of a wider programme on reliable machine learning for MS. You'll join a growing team of students working on uncertainty in MS, collaborate closely with the neurology team at University Hospital Southampton, and have access to the University's Iridis supercomputer.
The School of Electronics and Computer Science is committed to promoting equality, diversity inclusivity as demonstrated by our Athena SWAN award. We welcome all applicants regardless of their gender, ethnicity, disability, sexual orientation or age, and will give full consideration to applicants seeking flexible working patterns and those who have taken a career break. The University has a generous maternity policy, onsite childcare facilities, and offers a range of benefits to help ensure employees’ well-being and work-life balance. The University of Southampton is committed to sustainability and has been awarded the Platinum EcoAward.
