Fellowship Bio

I am an Ophthalmologist Registrar specialising in corneal and ocular surface disease. Before joining the Clinical AI Fellowship, I completed a Digital Fellowship at Moorfields Eye Hospital, where I facilitated the deployment of new technologies within our clinical services.

Fellowship Project

Leveraging Natural Language Processing and Large Language Models in the Hospital Outpatient Setting

Moorfields Eye Hospital NHS Foundation Trust

My project aimed to leverage natural language processing (NLP) to extract clinical information from patient letters. My role was to oversee the development and validation of proof-of-concept applications to inform potential deployment. Our internally developed BERT-based NLP tool was able to extract diagnoses and elements of structured examination (for example, visual acuity) from patient letters. With rapid development in large language model (LLM) capabilities, we explored whether commercially available or open source technologies could better achieve our goals. Collaborating with a computational analytics company with early access to ChatGPT, we developed a second proof-of-concept. Even without any Ophthalmology specific training, this was able to structure clinical data from correspondence, and in fact went substantially beyond our expectations – it was able to reconcile discrepancies in a series of correspondence, negating a medication incorrectly documented in a letter based on a subsequent letter that identified the error. This work has paved the way for forming strategic insights into our deployment, including decisions on whether to buy or build solutions, tailoring bespoke use cases for pre-coding referrals, and running LLMs through a private cloud. While continuing to work towards deployment, I am developing an organisational strategy to guide the integration of AI technologies into our clinical services. I have also received Topol Fellowship funding to embed Clinical Informatics training into Ophthalmology curricular delivery, preparing the workforce for the safe and responsible use of these technologies once deployed.

Fellowship Testimonial

The Fellowship in Clinical AI has been a transformative step in my career. First and foremost, it has been an absolute pleasure and inspiration to get to know the faculty and other Fellows. The diffusion of knowledge, ideas and enthusiasm has been fascinating, and I have greatly enjoyed bringing these new perspectives back to my department. The teaching sessions and curriculum offered an excellent blend of self-directed learning and lectures. I have honed my technical skills with the Innovation Scholars and Datacamp courses; while interactive sessions with faculty, industry partners and leaders in the field have helped me contextualise this knowledge. The detailed understanding of best practices in AI deployment and medical device regulation has informed my project and will put me in good stead for future AI deployment initiatives.