My 5-month placement with the CSC team

1 July 2022

Hi everyone! I am a 1st year Clinical Engineering Trainee on the NHS Scientist Training Programme, and the past 5 months or so I have had the privilege to spend a couple of days a week with the CSC team. Whilst completing the MSc portion of the STP, Haris Shuaib delivered a lecture where he introduced his team and the work they do – I did not think I would have the unique opportunity to be joining them a couple of months later. I left the introductory lecture very inspired, yet after engaging with the team and participating in their day-to-day work I was filled with twice the inspiration, gratitude and motivation to continue in such a rewarding career.

Given the fact that the CSC Team has only recently been built, I was impressed by the broad number of projects they are currently working on and their significant contributions in digital health at GSTT. It was particularly interesting to note the many applications of Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence in healthcare. I had the exciting opportunity to work with most, if not all, of the members and their respective projects. Joining the stand-up meetings twice a week and fortnightly 10X workshops also allowed me to receive regular updates on the projects I may not have been directly involved with. I could say for certain that I received a glimpse of most projects, especially as the team were extremely welcoming and would often invite me to their meetings and workshops.

As I had the privilege to be with the team for a couple of months, I was able to see the progress of the projects I worked on. The main project I was involved with was the Scaphoid and Occult Carpal Detection in MRI with Dika and Laurence. We organised and prepared the data that would be used to train a model. I also attended a series of meetings with the radiologists to better understand the content that I would include in the project documentation. For instance, the user requirements specification.

In addition to this project, I was able to participate in several others. XNAT is a relatively new platform to the Trust, and thus, I contributed to its validation testing. This included reviewing the clinical safety case report which gave me an overall recognition of the many potential risks that are associated with such applications. Furthermore, with Dika’s support, I was able to understand a Python script that can be used to anonymise imaging data.

I was particularly in awe by the AIDE project currently being developed with Answer Digital. Anil and Haleema provided me with an introduction to its functionality and a brief roadmap of its deployment. With Tom’s guidance, I was then able to review the operational acceptance testing tasks that are to be conducted and the expected results. Tom, as well as Lucrezia, also took me through the web development of the new CSC website. I then contributed to the platforms page and was able to see the website go live at the end of my placement, which was extremely rewarding.

Whilst working on these projects, I used GitHub to view project information as well as share code and documentation with the rest of the team. I can definitely agree that this platform is largely useful for collaborative and long-term projects, and I look forward to using it again in future work within my career.

In addition, during my placement, I attended Digital Health REWIRED with the team. This experience gave me the opportunity to network with a community of innovators within the digital health industry. It was extremely insightful learning about the many ongoing developments not only within GSTT but also outside the trust.

Overall, I had an unforgettable journey with the CSC team where I received such an extensive insight to digital health. I would like to extend my sincere gratitude to Haris for allowing me to join his team, and to my supervisors Dika and Anil for their constant support and guidance throughout. I would also like to thank the rest of the team for being so welcoming and constantly willing to share their work with me. I will definitely take forward the skills I developed, and I look forward to working within the digital health field in the future.