Cohort 4

Dijana Vilic

  • Senior Clinical Scientist in Artificial Intelligence
  • Guy's and St Thomas' NHS Foundation Trust
  • @DijanaVilic
  • 2023

In my 12 months as a Topol Digital Fellow I will work on a data access pipeline to facilitate fast research access to medical images while applying highest anonymisation standards, enhancing patient privacy while enabling AI development and evaluation.

My Topol fellowship problem / project:

The process of accessing medical images for service development and research within the NHS is notoriously slow and cumbersome for a number of reasons. Because of this, many projects take years to complete or become abandoned as funding runs out and staff leave. At Guy’s and St Thomas’ Trust we have set up a research picture archiving system that extracts and thoroughly de-identifies medical images that is capable of extracting up to 1000 images a day – bringing the timeline for data access from years down to months or even weeks. However, our solution can currently only support one project at a time which has created a backlog of data requests. I will use my Topol fellowship to scale up our solution to enable data extraction for multiple projects at a time at high speed – allowing service development, audits, research projects, AI development and AI evaluations to be completed significantly quicker. Everything that is developed as part of our solution will be available for everyone else to use freely, with the hope that establishing similar data access pipelines in other NHS trusts will speed up digital transformation at scale across the whole NHS.

My background is in computing science, psychology and medical physics. I completed the NHS Scientist Training Programme (Medical Physics) with specialisation in Imaging with Ionising Radiation in 2018, and worked as a Nuclear Medicine Physicist at Imperial College Healthcare Trust for two years in a clinical role, acquiring hands-on experience in therapy, imaging and image processing, before joining the Guy’s and St Thomas’ Trust as a Senior Clinical Scientist in Artificial Intelligence. My main focus now is data access and AI development and evaluation.