Medical Image Annotator 2025

The current opportunity is available for current Manchester Met students, to apply you must be based in the UK for the duration of the role.

The Department of Life Sciences are seeking to appoint students from Manchester Metropolitan University to work on the project: A clinical tool for real-time visualization and analysis of neck muscles for cervical dystonia.

Everyday activities such as looking around, balance and posture or any use of our arms and hands, relies on us having good control of our head and neck muscles. However, adults with a neurological condition such as cervical dystonia often experience unwanted involuntary contractions in the neck muscles associated with abnormal and often painful postures of the head and neck. This condition inevitably impacts on everyday life and functional ability.

As part of this project, the department needs annotation of ultrasound and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) images to develop automated, objective recognition of cervical muscles and their activity in adults with and without cervical dystonia.

Main duties/responsibilities.

• You will annotate ultrasound and MRI images of human neck (healthy person and people with dystonia).
• You will down specific muscles and structures of the neck precisely, following specific instructions.

Dates: Between April 2025 and December 2025.

Training:

• Compulsory weekly on campus classroom training sessions of 2 hours in duration per week during April and May 2025.
• Training sessions will be held each week on Mondays OR Thursdays (5:00pm – 7:00pm) in the Institute of Sport
• The training period begins during week commencing 14 April 2025
• It is an essential requirement to attend one session each week.
• Progression through the training sessions will depend upon passing a quality control assessment at the end of each training session.
• There will be two end of training exams (MRI, Ultrasound) taken in the classroom to determine your ability to annotate structures to adequate quality based on specific followed instructions and to decide whether you will be employed for further annotations.
• Once training is completed and all exams are passed, in April/May 2025 onwards, annotators will be allowed to work offsite for more hours per week.

Hours: Two hours per week during training. Up to 16 hours per week following training and once exams are passed.

For those who complete and pass the training the role may be extended, and remote work will be offered for those who are fully trained and who maintain a consistent quality of work.

Person Specification

This role is open only to current students from Manchester Metropolitan University who are/have:

• Access to a personal computer with Windows operating system for the role
• IT competent
• Have excellent attention to detail.
• Who pass the initial screening test
• Able to commit to one two-hour class every week (5-7pm Monday or 5-7pm Thursday).

Before applying for this role all prospective candidates will be required to:

(1) Download the software VggImageAnnotator by clicking on the VGG Annotator download link.

(2) Download the annotation guidebook and images for the annotation (at dropboxLink, the password is dystonia

(3) Read the annotation guidebook carefully line-by-line. Use VggImageAnnotator to annotate 2 images. Rename your annotation to J4S_via_project_YOURNAME.json  and upload them to https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1RdyJr7SwXkxIcsIb0cx0EJTQFqVs7p0ed7bIcP3zYZY before the deadline of the application.

This requires a google account, please send it to [email protected] if you do not have one).