Big Picture Medicine

Isn't it strange when everyone is raving about something — but you just — don't get it? That's the position Dr David Watkins (@DrMurphy11) found himself in in 2017. Babylon had launched in the UK and promised to provide the powers of AI and telemedicine to the NHS. Babylon lets you video consult with a doctor, often on the same day. This was slightly controversial , but not compared to its other h...

How do you get into MedTech and collaborate with DeepMind/Google Health to lead world-renowned Deep Learning research? All to help stop people from going blind?  This is 30 minutes of pure gold — Dr Pearse Keane's advice on how to get into exciting Deep Learning projects, approaches that worked for him and books he recommends. Dr Pearse Keane is a consultant ophthalmologist and NIHR Clinician...

Ever wondered if astronauts are honest with their doctors? Or what it feels like to look out of the window at Earth? Helen Sharman was the first British astronaut. Project Juno, was a joint Soviet-British programme which took Helen to the Mir Space Station. Helen was working as a research technologist for Mars (the confectionery company) before hearing about the opportunity on the radio. We talked...

What’s AI? What’s machine learning? What’s deep learning? This week’s episode is a crash course on machine learning for medics. Dr Chris Lovejoy is a doctor, data scientist and content creator. He runs some exceptional ‘machine learning for medics’ day courses in London which is where I met him — and he also puts out loads of great content on his YouTube channel and newsletter. He also recently pu...

What are the realities of trying to procure PPE during a pandemic? As the government has given the NHS a 'blank cheque' to fight against COVID-19 — why can't we just throw money at the PPE shortage? To get answers, I spoke to Dr Alisa Pearlstone — the project director at NHS Hero Support — a pop up, emergency PPE delivery service. They’ve teamed up with the Doctors Association and Letsbeatcovid to...

What do you when hospitals are running out of Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) and your colleagues are at risk? Ryan and his team at Oxford Inspired have created a PPE mask out of scuba masks. They plan to deliver 3000 of these to the frontlines — but how do they work? And why are they having to step in? You can donate to the fundraiser at: www.oxford-inspired.com and you can find Ryan's innova...

"I'm going to go out on a limb and say that AI isn't going to get us out of the covid-19 crisis." Natasha Loder, Health Policy Editor at the Economist. Except, some researchers are trying just that. They're using deep learning to read CT scans and try to diagnose COVID-19, as well as building other types of models to predict the prognosis (mortality, length of hospital stay etc.) of the disease. A...

Curious about how the UK made the decision to the lock the country down? It was made using epidemiological models. One research team has been particularly influential in their response — the Imperial College team led by Professor Neil Ferguson. Their model predicted that an unchecked COVID-19 epidemic would overwhelm the NHS and result in 500,000 UK deaths. They suggested that we may need to have...

What can 2 million retinal images and a machine-learning algorithm achieve? Early-detection of Alzheimers —at least that's what Dr Siegfried Wagner along with a team led by Dr Pearse Keane at the Moorfields Eye Hospital are working towards.  We discuss the study at Moorfields, before going down a deep dive into how a relatively novel AI technique—Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) can be...

A professor of Pathology who has accepted his impending redundancy from AI image recognition—Professor Neil Sebire is also the Chief Research Information Officer at Great Ormond Street Hospital (GOSH); the country's leading children's research hospital. We talk about the future of pathology and paediatrics in the context of AI, how he partnered with Microsoft to create the GOSH in Minecraft and I...

Blockchain (the technology behind Bitcoin) can be difficult to understand. It's been surrounded by cultish hype and it's not immediately obvious how it relates to healthcare. In this episode, Dr Abdullah Albeyatti gives an 'Explain-Like-I'm-Five-Years-Old' explanation of blockchain and covers how it can be used to manage patient records, in clinical trials and even on the organ donation registry.&...