Projects

Helmholtz Information & Data Science School for Health (HIDSS4Health) is a structured doctoral program jointly operated by the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), the German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ), and Heidelberg University. It brings together over 40 interdisciplinary research groups at the intersection of data science and health.

PhD candidates are engaged in projects across imaging, diagnostics, surgical technologies, and personalized medicine. The curriculum combines data science and life sciences, awarding graduates a certificate as "Data Scientist" with specialization in health-related applications.

Project: Learning Anatomical and Pathological Priors from Multi-modal and Report-based Data

Despite recent advances in biomedical image segmentation, most approaches lack explicit incorporation of anatomical knowledge. While radiologists rely on structured understanding of the human body, models typically learn implicit representations focused on localized regions.

To address this gap, our project develops a dataset covering the full human body across multiple imaging modalities. Additionally, we utilize radiological reports as weak supervision to capture how observed anatomy aligns or deviates from normative patterns.

Combining these sources, we train models that explicitly encode anatomical and pathological priors. One key application is to enable semantic search across anatomical datasets. Our system will support queries such as “Retrieve all CT scans with left lungs of diameter X showing signs of pulmonary embolism.”