Cohort 4

Alexander Grimwood

  • Proton Therapy Physicist
  • University College London Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust
  • @grimicist
  • 2023

In my 12 months as a Topol Digital Fellow I establish an AI development platform to facilitate research, evaluation and production of clinical tools for advanced radiotherapy techniques.

My Topol fellowship problem / project:

I want to improve dosimetric assessment of radiotherapy patients by using artificial intelligence (AI). These assessments are performed after each treatment session to evaluate how well a patient conforms to their treatment plan each day, and whether adaptations to the plan are required. AI tools can help this evaluation in a number of ways, potentially reducing treatment times, improving treatment quality and helping staff be more efficient. Dosimetric assessment is a perennial bottleneck for radiotherapy staff, because they must coordinate complex tasks in limited time with little room for error. Existing AI tools can speed up assessments, calculate treatment adaptations, or be used to enable increasingly sophisticated techniques, but are to hard to bring into the clinic. Through the Topol fellowship, I want to create a software development environment in my department specifically tailored to building these AI tools whilst addressing barriers usually encountered, such as: protecting patient data, ensuring algorithms are unbiased, and making the tools available to other radiotherapy centres within the NHS.

I am a medical physicist at the Proton Beam Therapy Centre, University College London Hospital. With over 10 years’ experience in medical physics spanning both clinic and research, my motivation has always been to improve patient care through using the latest technologies. Currently a member of the physics team developing a state of the art proton beam radiotherapy service, my interests include medical imaging and AI for radiotherapy.