Dr P Yeates, Dr B Mandal, Prof J Protheroe, Prof R McKinley
No more applications being accepted
Funded PhD Project (European/UK Students Only)
About the Project
Join an ambitious team at the UK’s leading campus-based university to complete a project that combines education, clinical medicine and computer science.
Applicants should have a good first degree (2:1 or above for BSc; or Medical Degree) in a relevant discipline. A masters’ degree or relevant post-graduate research or educational experience is desirable.
Funding is available for three years to cover fees for PhD registration (2020/21 home/EU rates: £4,407) and a research studentship stipend of currently £15,285 per annum for 2020/21. NonEU students would be required to pay the balance (currently approximately £11,200 per annum) of the overseas fees themselves. The post will be housed in Keele University School of Medicine in
collaboration with Keele University School of Computing and Mathematics.
The project:
Accurately assessing trainee health professionals’ clinical empathy is vital for their professional development. Existing methods are costly, time consuming and show a lot of variability between assessors. This research will explore the potential to create an automatic method of scoring trainee health professionals, which could augment or automate examiners’ judgements.
The research will use computer vision and machine learning technologies to categorise behavioural features of trainee health professionals’ communication in simulated consultations with patients so that these can be aligned with human annotation of displayed clinical empathy in order to learn a general model of clinical empathy which could be used in assessment or training. The work will be
collaborative, involving individuals from a medicine / social science background and computer scientists. This PhD opportunity concerns the medicine / social science aspects of the work, which will proceed in 2 phases:
The first phase will involve developing a comprehensive framework of the behavioural features of clinical empathy from the literature and using this to annotate the occurrences of these features in videos of students communicating with simulated patients. This information will be used by computer scientists to optimise existing algorythms to recognise “mid-level” features (e.g. eye contact with patients, speaking-to-listening ratio, gestures and facial expressions, and non-verbal utterances).
The second phase of the research will pilot methods of collecting ratings of clinical empathy in videos of simulated consultations from a large diverse sample of the UK population. This will involve filming additional simulated consultations, performing pilot interviews with members of the public to develop data collection methods and developing recruitment strategies to include a representative sample of
the UK population via a web-based research platform. Empathy ratings of an initial sample of videos by members of the public will be used by computer scientists to pilot approaches to predict empathy ratings from the combination of mid-level features shown in each video.
These results will inform further funding applications and research to reach the programmes overall aims.
https://www.keele.ac.uk/medicine/research/medicaleducation/#people
Funding Notes
All fees paid at current UK/EU rates, for three years only. Stipend paid at current Research Council rate (£15,285/pa), for three
years full time.
Fees provided at EU rates only, Non-EU students would be required to pay the additional overseas fees themselves.
Fees will only be paid for three years full time.
Keele University Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences PhD Fellowship Scheme
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