Group leaders
Our group is led by Dr Honghan Wu and Dr Beatrice Alex.
Dr Honghan Wu
Honghan is a Rutherford Research Fellow funded by MRC/HDR UK. His research involves the application of text technologies and Knowledge Graph techniques to analyse EHRs. The goal is to derive a consistent and comprehensive patient phenome from unstructured and structured EHRs and provide semantic computation upon it to support decision making for tailored care, trial recruitment and research.
Dr Beatrice Alex
Beatrice is Senior Lecturer and Chancellor's Fellow at the Edinburgh Futures Institute at the University of Edinburgh. Her clinical NLP research is on applying text mining methods to different types of raw text electronic healthcare records. She is also Head of the Edinburgh Language Technology Group.
Clinical leaders
Professor Ewen Harrison
Ewen is Professor of Surgery and Data Science at the University of Edinburgh and a Consultant HPB and Transplant Surgeon at the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh. His research interests include crowd-sourcing patient-level date, surgical trials, mobile data collection platforms and "wearables", automated data processing and display, natural language processing/sentiment analysis, decision modelling, Bayesian statistics, administrative data analysis, and patient reported outcomes.
Dr William Whiteley
Will is a Scottish Senior Clinical Fellow (funded by CSO) in the Centre for Clinical Brain Sciences, University of Edinburgh. His work seeks to elucidate the mechanisms for prevention of disability due to stroke and dementia through the design, delivery and analysis of epidemiological studies and clinical trials. Of particular interest to him is the better use of large electronic health record datasets for more efficient clinical trials and cohort studies.
Other members
Archie Campbell
Archie is the Data Manager for the Generation Scotland biobank, with a background in systems analysis and programming. He is responsible for liaising with researchers to give them access to the biobank's resources, with expertise in using medical records for research.
Dr Arlene Casey
Arlene is a research fellow in health data science, currently within the Advanced Care Research Centre, applying natural language processing (NLP) techniques to free-text electronic health records (EHRs) and combining this with structured data to identify disease e.g., strokes, brain tumours and conditions related to advanced age syndromes, such as cognitive impairment, mobility. With 15 years’ industry experience in pharmaceutical research, Arlene has very strong skills in data provision and analyses, project delivery in addition to a good understanding of governance regulations. This has led to her part-time secondment to DataLoch (health data-provider for the SouthEast Scotland region) where she works on NLP methodologies to ensure safe, unbiased and meaningful provision of free-text EHRs for research.
Dr Emma Davidson
Emma is a Public Health clinician with interests in data science, chronic disease prevention, and health inequality. She is a Clinical Research Training Fellow in the Centre for Clinical Brain Sciences and is undertaking a PhD looking at the automated processing of brain imaging reports to identify simple brain phenotypes that increase dementia risk.
Dr Hang Dong
Hang is a Research Fellow (funded by HDR UK) in the Centre for Medical Informatics, Usher Institute. He is working on applied machine learning, natural language processing (NLP), and data mining for phenotyping from electronic health records.
Matúš Falis
Matúš is a PhD student in the UKRI CDT in Biomedical AI at the School of Informatics. His research is in document classification based on medical ontologies with a focus on rare labels.
Robin Flaig
Robin is the Operations Manager for Generation Scotland and is responsible for maintaining current data linkages and expanding new ones. She also works with Archie Campbell to provide access to researchers to the GS biobank resource.
Andreas Grivas
Andreas's research is on applied machine learning (ML) for natural language processing (NLP). He has extended EdIE-N, a neural network based text mining system for analysing radiologists' brain imaging reports (MRI and CT scans).
Dr Claire Grover
Claire's research is in linguistics and NLP, with a focus on the syntactic and semantic analysis of text. She is the main author of EdIE-R, a text mining system for analysing radiologists' brain imaging reports (MRI and CT scans).
Aidan Hutchison
Aidan is Database Designer, Developer and Consultant in the Centre for Medical Informatics, Usher Institute.
Dr Grant Mair
Grant is Senior Clinical Lecturer (funded by the Stroke Association) and Honorary Consultant Neuroradiologist in the Centre for Clinical Brain Sciences, University of Edinburgh and NHS Lothian, respectively. Grant's work aims to improve our understanding and use of brain imaging biomarkers in patients with stroke both for clinical trials and routine practice.
Dr Michael Poon
Michael is a neurosurgeon interested in epidemiology and data science. His research focus is on brain tumours and haemorrhages. He is undertaking a PhD to determine predictors of treatment response in patients with gliomas - a type of brain tumour.
Dr Víctor Suárez Paniagua
Víctor is a Research Fellow funded by the Health Data Research UK in the Centre for Medical Informatics, Usher Institute of the University of Edinburgh. His research is on machine learning, with an emphasis on deep learning, for natural language processing in order to extract relevant information from medical documents accurately.
Professor Catherine Sudlow
Cathie is a clinical neurologist and epidemiologist and Director of HDR UK’s British Heart Foundation Data Science Centre. Her clinical work involves assessing and treating patients with suspected acute stroke (or ‘brain attack’) in the hospital emergency department. Her research interests have always been firmly embedded in the world of big data, with a focus on large scale, collaborative, open science efforts to understand the causes (in our genes, environment and lifestyle), detection, prevention and treatment of major diseases, especially those that affect people in middle and older age.
Richard Tobin
Richard’s research is in NLP and he has worked on text mining in various domains. He developed the LT-XML2 toolkit for NLP, which is used in the EdiE-R and EdiE-Viz pipelines.
Dr Heather Whalley
Heather is a Reader in psychiatric neuroimaging and data science at the Centre for Clinical Brain Sciences at the University of Edinburgh and is the mental health lead within the clinical NLP group. Together with Dr Alex she leads the NLP WP within the MRC pathfinder project “Leveraging routinely collected and linked research data to study the causes and consequences of common mental health disorders”, linking mental health and radiological phenotypes using NLP methods.
Dr Huayu Zhang
Huayu is a Research Fellow based at Advanced Care Research Centre and Centre for Medical Informatics, Usher Institute at the University of Edinburgh. His research includes network analysis and knowledge graph techniques for gene prioritisation, risk prediction, and text analytics.
Alumni
Dr Daniel Duma
Dr Philip Gorinski