Queen Square Analytics (QSA) announces an Innovate UK Scholar award to develop ultra-efficient analysis tools for neurological clinical trials. This award is a secondment for Dr Daniele Ravi, Senior Lecturer at University of Hertfordshire and an alumnus of University College London to continue advanced AI enabled commercial research at QSA.
Co-founder of QSA and Senior Research Fellow at University College London Arman Eshaghi commented:
"This prestigious award endorses our research into ultra-efficient AI at QSA. It will provide QSA with the latest AI technology to automate time-consuming manual tasks that are usually done by human raters for quality checking, analysis and validation of results in neurology clinical trials. This highly exciting project to commercialise the latest and greatest AI technology can potentially free up thousands of hours for human experts to focus on more demanding and specialised tasks not possible by computers.”
Prior to appearing on the pharmacy's shelf, drugs undergo careful research in clinical trials. These clinical trials assess biological changes in the human body to determine whether or not a given drug is effective. In neurological clinical trials, brain MRI scans are used to test whether a treatment has any effect on the brain or not. However, the way in which these brain MRIs are analysed is becoming increasingly complex in order to extract often subtle information of interest, increasingly falling out of the reach of human experts. Current computational tools are time-consuming to deal with thousands of scans that are typically collected in large-scale clinical trials and checking the quality of results requires substantial manual human intervention.
In the analysis of brain scans, where conventional tools lag behind in speed and, more recently, in precision, artificial intelligence (AI) excels; now more than ever, AI is able to automatize tasks, inconceivable a few years ago, that can be used to reshape the healthcare infrastructure in terms of efficiency, cost and precision. Such tasks include identifying similar patterns of disease in dissimilar brain images and millisecond quantification of brain structures. This brings ultra-efficiency to image analysis and will expedite neurological clinical trials.
Innovate UK’s award will start from 1st of February 2021 and will last for three years. This award will bring together academics from University College London and University of Hertfordshire to deliver real world impact at QSA and improve the lives of patients living with neurological disorders worldwide.
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