COMPUTATIONAL ONCOLOGY LABORATORY
About us
We run a translational research group, focused on clinical applications of computing in medicine and are affiliated with Imperial College London. We focus on mathematical and computational approaches to improving healthcare, particularly translational and clinical applications of these approaches. These include using clinical "big data" to understand clinical outcomes, novel reasoning techniques to better understand clinical trials, computer-enhanced interpretation of imaging and using data from patient-worn sensors and online data collection.
Our work is divided into three main areas:
Near-patient sensing
Big data and Artificial Intelligence
Training, skills & partnerships
We try to change life of patients diagnosed with cancer and their family as best as we can: when they come to have their treatment, once they leave the hospital and after they have finished their treatments thanks to nationally collected NHS data.
TIMELINE
Once upon a time, the Computational Oncology Laboratory...
August 2016
The Computational Oncology Laboratory is created between Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust and Imperial College London (London, UK) by two people only: a consultant clinical oncologist and a data analyst.
September 2017
Our first PhD student, Dr Seema Dadhania, creates and starts her clinical trial, "BrainWear".
September 2018
Our second PhD student, Dr James Wang, joins us to work on UK BioBank data.
September 2019
Dr Aizaan Anwar is our new PhD student to work on her own clinical trial, "BrainApp".
September 2020
Miss Radvile Mauricaite joins the team as our new data analyst working on a project involving national patient-level data ("Gliocova") among other exciting projects (e.g., CURIE, image segmentation).
December 2020
A new PhD student, Mr Dekai Zhang, joins the Lab to work on his Federated Explainable AI project.
April 2021
Dr Jonathan Gregory, a formal consultant orthopaedic oncological surgeon, is the new addition to our lab as a honorary research fellow.
September 2021
Novel addition to the Lab! Our fourth PhD student, Miss Qiquan Wang, works on modern statistics and statistical machine learning.
October 2022
Dr Andrew Ho re-joins us for his MD looking at outcomes in patients with brain metastases.
2016 - now
Many undergraduate, MRes & MSc students have joined us to complete their thesis and/or research projects and a few had papers published in conferences and peer-reviewed journals.
People from all over the work join us to combine expertise and knowledge. There are over 9 nationalities present in the laboratory: Chinese, English, French, German, Iranian, Italian, Lithuanian, Malaysian, Polish, Swedish, and counting!
Palliative care, brain tumours, cancer, radiotherapy, argumentation, statistics, programming languages (i.e., Python, Haskell), and artificial intelligence are our main areas of expertise and we love them.
Although some members of the laboratory are clinically trained, we work with people coming from a variety of backgrounds: computer science, mathematics, economics, radiomics, cancer charities, academics, royal colleges.
On average, we welcome six students per year. They stay with us from four to six months and they usually manage to get their work peer-reviewed in conferences and/or journals.
We celebrated our 5 years of existence in 2021! No celebration though.
We welcome four levels of education: Bachelor of science (BSc), Masters (MSc), doctorate (PhD) and junior doctors (e.g., F1, F2).
As of September 2021, three PhD students are currently working on their doctorate.
We are part of two different institutions: the National Healthcare Service (NHS) for the clinical work and Imperial College London for the academic research.
A single team shares all these skills and uniqueness.
