*Analysing Clinical Documents to Support Decision Making Processes in Emergency DepartmentsDeadline for application: August 26 2025, 13:00 CEST* One three-year PhD grant on Analysing Clinical Documents to Support Decision Making Processes in Emergency Departments is offered by the Doctoral Program in Brain, Mind & Computer Science (BMCS, http://hit.psy.unipd.it/BMCS) at the University of Padua, jointly with the Natural Language Processing research unit (https://nlplab.fbk.eu/) at Fondazione Bruno Kessler (Trento, Italy), where most of the research activities will be conducted. The language of the PhD programme is English.
The deadline for application is: August 26 2025, 13:00 CEST
For more information, the call, and applications look at: http://hit.psy.unipd.it/BMCS/admission
The candidate will have the unique opportunity to explore different fields (Natural Language Processing, Machine Learning, Health & Well-Being) being directly coached by very experienced teammates. The involved PhD will work in an international environment at Fondazione Bruno Kessler (Trento, Italy).
This PhD grant intends to exploit the capacity of Large Language Models (LLMs) to interpret the content of clinical documents produced in Emergency Departments (EDs) of hospitals in order to improve service quality for patients. The final goal of the project is to advance into the integration of generative AI models into healthcare, improving their alignment with the clinical expertise and the processes in EDs.
The major context of the PhD will be the Horizon project eCREAM ( ecreamproject.eu/), where, through active scientific protocols, several EDs of different EU countries are involved. On the one hand, the project will take advantage of LLMs for automatic filling of Case Report Forms from anonymized clinical notes in several languages. On the other hand, the reasoning capacities of LLMs will then be applied to the extracted information to derive statistical analysis that helps decision makers for better process efficiency.
The adoption of LLMs in the clinical field raises a number of research challenges, which will be addressed during the PhD. Such challenges include improving accuracy of performance, interpretability of decisions in classification tasks, coherence of reasoning capacity, mitigating the existence of biases, and risks related to data security.
Fondazione Bruno Kessler is an internationally well-known research center, whose information technology department ranks first among the Engineering and Information Science research centers in Italy.
The Natural Language Processing research unit (https://nlplab.fbk.eu/) is an internationally well known research group focused on text mining (information extraction and ontology population from text, analysis of the sentiment and of the emotional content of texts); conversational agents (task oriented dialogue systems, question answering, generation of persuasive messages); and development of linguistic resources, particularly for the Italian language. To get in contact with the NLP research unit and discuss about the opportunities of this call, contact Bernardo Magnini (magnini@fbk.eu)
The Doctoral Program in Brain, Mind & Computer Science (BMCS) emerges from the close collaboration between faculty from psychology, cognitive neuroscience and information science around the unifying topic of human-computer interaction. Its program rests on the assumption that the ability to work in groups with people of different background is now a fundamental condition to produce scientific excellence and to develop innovative skills that can be spent on the job market.
****Required/Preferred Candidate Skills and Competencies**** The candidate should possess basic knowledge on Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning techniques (particularly deep learning architectures and large language models). Experience on biomedical/clinical data will be a plus. Basic programming skills (e.g. Python) would complete the profile.
Proficiency in English is required, basic knowledge of Italian preferable.
****Instructions for applicants**** Interested applicants are invited to apply following the instructions given in
https://pica.cineca.it/unipd/dottorati41luglio
by August 26 2025, 13:00 CEST
For further information, please contact: Bernardo Magnini (magnini@fbk.eu)