Engineering and Physical Sciences Collaborative Research Scholars

EPSRC collaborative studentship: Advancing mechanistic understanding of atrial fibrillation through analytical and physics-based machine learning (2025)

What you get

As an EPSRC student you will join a vibrant doctoral community and will benefit from:

• 3.5 years of funding with a a tax free living allowance at the standard Research Council rate – currently £19,237 in 2024-5 – and international or UK PhD fees
• An option of 3 months of additional funding to cover a placement outside academia
• Funding for training and research expenses, such as conference trips and experimental costs
• Supervision by world-leading researchers
• Our Entrepreneurship Summer School and Responsible Research and Innovation workshops tailored to the needs of engineering and physical sciences researchers.
• Our Researcher Development workshops and access to taught modules relevant to your project.

Type of award

Postgraduate Research

PhD project

Atrial fibrillation (AF) is the most common heart rhythm disorder, but understanding its causes is challenging due to its complexity. It involves triggers like abnormal electrical signals (focal triggers) and swirling patterns of electrical activity (re-entrant rotors), which interact across the heart’s inner and outer layers. Because most studies to date focus on just one layer, understanding what keeps AF going is challenging.

This PhD project aims to bridge that gap by combining advanced machine learning tools with a new experimental protocol developed by University Hospital Sussex in collaboration with their industrial partner, and which makes it possible to collect data from both layers of the heart at the same time.

Key aims of this project are:
• to analyse dual-layer heart data to study how the inner and outer layers interact. In particular,we will focus on dissociation (when the layers do not synchronize), and investigate how it contributes to AF perpetuation (or maintenance/persistence);
• to build ML models that include the heart’s physical properties to find patterns in the data and
predict which areas in the heart drive AF.

This project will explore important questions such as: Are the patterns that drive AF stable or do they change over time? How do the heart’s layers interact during AF? Can stimulating the heart during normal rhythm help predict problem areas during AF?

Successful completion of this project will provide new insights into AF that could improve treatments, such as ablation, where small parts of the heart are treated to restore and maintain normal rhythm.

Although no medical background will be assumed, the successful applicant will have the unique opportunity to combine analytical and experimental work, through interacting with both academics at University of Sussex (particularly Sussex AI) and clinicians from University Hospitals Sussex, with technical support from industry.

Eligibility

Applicants should have/expect to have at least a 2:1 undergraduate honours degree in a relevant subject and meet our English language requirements. . They should have a strong background in physics and/or mathematics (e.g., PDE, optimization) and/or machine learning (applied to spatiotemporal data). International and UK applicants are both eligible to apply but in line with EPSRC regulations, international awards will be limited.

Sussex recognises the value of diversity in research communities and is committed to addressing patterns of under-representation. We recognise that a range of factors, both structural and individual, influence and impede pathways into postgraduate research in different ways.  If you wish, you may write a short, optional statement offering any further contextual information affecting your pathway to postgraduate research not included elsewhere that you think is relevant to your application.

Number of scholarships available

One

Deadline

14 February 2025 16:00

How to apply

1. Contact the main supervisor to find out more about their research and what they are looking for in a PhD application.
2. Read our guidance on PhD applications and apply for a PhD place at Sussex using the online PhD application system.
3. Apply for the PhD course in INFORMATICS.  List Prof Luc Berthouze as your preferred supervisor and enter “EPSRC iCASE 2025” in the “sources of funding” box.
4. Complete the EPSRC application form (in FILES section at the bottom of this page)  and upload it to your PhD application in the “Research Proposal “category. You may also upload an optional Contextual Information form (below)  if you wish to tell us more about any barriers you have faced. If the forms do not download with a Chrome browser, please use Edge or Firefox.
5. Upload as attachments along with your EPSRC application form, your CV. degree certificates and transcripts and English language qualifications if applicable before submitting the PhD application online.
6. Complete our online data collection form. This is not part of the assessment process but used for reporting to the EPSRC.

   https://qualtricsxm4dz52nmjl.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_9FZsYtb6a855Ado

Relevant papers are:

• Xu CH, Xiong F, Jiang WF, Liu X, Liu T, Qin M. Rotor mechanism and its mapping in atrial fibrillation. EP Europace. 2023 Mar 30;25(3):783–92.
• Xie J, Yao B. Physics-constrained deep active learning for spatiotemporal modeling of cardiac electrodynamics. Computers in Biology and Medicine. 2022 Jul;146:105586.
• Juliá J, Manoharan K, Mann I, McCready J, Muthurajah J, Silberbauer J. Assessment of pericardial adhesions by means of the EpiCO2 technique: the Brighton adhesion classification.Heart Rhythm. 2024 May 9:S1547-5271(24)02551-7.
• Parameswaran R, Kalman JM, Royse A, Goldblatt J, Larobina M, Watts T, et al. Endocardial-Epicardial Phase Mapping of Prolonged Persistent Atrial Fibrillation Recordings. Circulation: Arrhythmia and Electrophysiology. 2020 Aug;13(8):e008512.
• Silva Garcia E, Lobo-Torres I, Fernández-Armenta J, Penela D, Fernandez-Garcia M, Gomez-Lopez A, et al. Functional mapping to reveal slow conduction and substrate progression in atrial fibrillation. Europace. 2023 Nov 2;25(11):euad246.

 

Sponsors

These scholarships are funded by the UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC)

Contact us

For questions regarding your chosen research project, please contact the project supervisor: Professor Luc Berthouze

If you have questions relating to the online application process, please contact enginf-pgr@sussex.ac.uk  for Informatics and Engineering

You might also be interested in

  This project is part of the Sussex EPSRC Doctoral Landscape Award.  Further detaials are here:  

https://www.sussex.ac.uk/study/fees-funding/phd-funding/view/1818-EPSRC-Science-and-Engineering-studentships

Timetable

14^th February 2025 (23:59): Deadline for applications
January to March 2025: Interviews 
From late March 2025: Awards confirmed