Ingénieur MEDITWIN en modélisation et couplage de simulateurs 0D/3D

Level of qualifications required : Graduate degree or equivalent

Fonction : Temporary scientific engineer

Level of experience : From 3 to 5 years

About the research centre or Inria department

Context

The MEDITWIN project is a collaborative digital health project resulting from a partnership between three major players: Dassault Systèmes, IHU France, and Inria. Its objective is to revolutionize medical practices through the development of personalized digital twins of organs, metabolism, and cancerous tumors to improve understanding, diagnosis, and treatment.

10 Inria research teams, spread across 5 centers, are involved in the project.

The SIMBIOTX team provides mechanistic modeling of cardiovascular circulation. In particular, some models require the coupled use of simple, fast, spatially "large" scale (whole body) frameworks, and more complex, computationally expensive, "small" scale (heart, small length of a blood vessel...) frameworks. These two types of models are implemented in independent software packages.

This position aims to build first an interoperability model and implementation for two existing packages, then expand this implementation to other models used in the scope of MEDITWIN.

The position is open at Inria Saclay center in the SED (Experimentation and Development Service). The initial contract will be for 12 months, renewable.

Assignment

In the scope of MEDITWIN, the SIMBIOTX team provides coupled 0D-3D mechanistic models applied to pediatric cardiology.

You will specify an interoperability model between the providers of the different layers of these models, and implement it as a library. This interoperability model has to be generic enough to accommodate and be integrated with minimal modifications of the codebase in different model provider softwares. The first practical application will be with LumpedFlux, developed by SIMBIOTX, and FELisCe, developed by COMMEDIA, both Inria teams involved in MEDITWIN.

On the longer run, this interoperability library will hopefully be used more widely and in different "types" of models (eg, the two already mentioned are 0D and CFD models, but agent-based or ML models are also of interest). As such, it should be as agnostic as possible to the numerical methods used in the coupling, as well as to hardware specifics, when applicable (eg CFD is often run on GPUs).

There are open source libraries for broadly similar purposes, but they are either not as generic as we'd want, specialised on physics or mathematics as opposed to model-agnostic, or simply too difficult to use for research teams without dedicated software engineers. These will be reviewed and possibly partly reused, where appropriate and where licensing permits it.

Beyond this main assignment, other collaborations with actors of the MEDITWIN project are expected.

Main activities

• Review existing open source coupling libraries specialised in physics modeling;
• Write requirements and specification, with constant feedback from researchers and engineers involved in the project, of an interoperability library dedicated to medical twins, generic enough to be integrated to several of the existing modeling softwares we use in the field;
• Implement and document a first version of this interoperability library;
• Integrate it into the existing softwares LumpedFlux (0D hemodynamics models) and FELiScE (3D computational fluid dynamics). Both are developed by Inria and will be used to produce coupled models in the scope of MEDITWIN. If possible with the given timeline, implement it in other codes.

Skills

• Experience in software engineering, in particular:
  • Common interoperability technologies, such as:
    • Messaging protocols (e.g., Protobuf), RPC;
    • Middleware (e.g., Apache Kafka);
    • Generic interoperability libraries (e.g., Kafka Connect).
  • Proficiency in C++ (most of our hemodynamic software is written in C++), minimum knowledge of Python;
  • Understanding of long-term maintainability and software testing techniques;
• An interest in applied mathematics or mechanistic modeling will be viewed positively;
• Fluent technical English.
• Teamwork, particularly in an interdisciplinary context (researchers, healthcare professionals);
• Analytical and writing skills (functional and technical documentation);
• Experience contributing to open source software will be viewed positively.

Benefits package

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Instruction to apply

Defence Security : This position is likely to be situated in a restricted area (ZRR), as defined in Decree No. relating to the protection of national scientific and technical potential (PPST). Authorisation to enter an area is granted by the director of the unit, following a favourable Ministerial decision, as defined in the decree of 3 July 2012 relating to the PPST. An unfavourable Ministerial decision in respect of a position situated in a ZRR would result in the cancellation of the appointment.

Recruitment Policy : As part of its diversity policy, all Inria positions are accessible to people with disabilities.