People

David Harris-Birtill

Dr David Harris-Birtill is a Senior Lecturer in Computer Science, and leads the Medical Technology team. With a focus on creating image and signal processing technologies for clinical benefit, his research background – like his current projects – brings together many disciplines to solve global problems in healthcare. He has a background in Medical Physics, experience working in medical schools and hospitals including the Institute of Cancer Research, Imperial College London and the Royal Marsden Hospital in London, and he also researches in Computer Science. He is currently principal investigator (PI) in St Andrews for the Innovate UK funded iCAIRD project to classify cancer in histopathology images. He has been principal investigator (PI) in Digital Health and Care Institute (DHI) grants to measure people’s vital signs using cameras, and PI in an Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) grant on using deep learning for cancer segmentation in medical images, and PI on an EPSRC Global Challenges funded project to detect pollutants using radar and machine learning. He also is Director of the new Digital Health MSc programme at the University of St Andrews, creating and running this programme, and has commercialised his research as Founder and Director of the company Beyond Medics.

Mahnaz Mohammadi

Dr Mahnaz Mohammadi is a data scientist in the School of Medicine. Her current research focuses on using AI in digital pathology. She received her PhD in reconfigurable architectures from Indian Institute of Sciences (IISc), Bangalore, India in 2017. She was then awarded a one year research position in the same lab (CadLab) where she did her PhD. At the end of 2017 she was offered a research associate position at Durham University. Her research at Durham University focused on knowledge discovery from unstructured data.

Her main research interests are: Computer vision, NLP, Deep Learning, Semi Supervised Learning and Reconfigurable Architectures.

Christina Fell

My interests are in using deep learning to interpret images. During my PhD in the School of Mathematics and Statistics at the University of St Andrews, I was aiming to detect animals in aerial imagery combining convolutional neural networks and statistical modelling techniques. My interest in the application of these techniques to medical images began as part of the iCAIRD project when I was using deep learning to detect cancer in histopathology slides for gynaecological cancers. My current project focuses on combining brain MRI scans and genetic risk measures.

Pireh Pirzada

Pireh Pirzada is a PhD student in Computer Science at the University of St Andrews supervised by Dr David Harris-Birtill and Dr Gayle Helane Doherty. Her research focuses on smart homes to support the health and well-being of older adults living alone whilst providing a safe and secure environment.

She is working with Beyond medics on Automated Remote Pulse oximetry system (ARPOS) to remote monitor vital signs. Pireh is working with computer vision and machine learning techniques and is also studying the ethical implications of assistive technologies for the elderly community.

Pireh’s background covers a diverse range from graphic and web design, project management, research and development as a software engineer in Pakistan. She founded a start-up company focused on e-learning of children with special needs in a virtual environment. Later, she joined IDL Autonetics as CTO and worked on various Education and BI Solutions.

David Morrison

David works as a data scientist in the school of medicine. His background is as a programmer and designer in the games industry and he holds a masters degree in human-computer interaction.

Patrick Schrempf

Patrick is currently studying for an EngD Computer Science at Canon Medical Research Europe (CMRE) and the University of St Andrews (2018-present). He completed his BSc Computer Science at the University of St Andrews in 2018. Originally from Vienna, he grew up bilingual speaking both German and English. For his project work he am based at the CMRE offices with their Artificial Intelligence research team in Edinburgh, where he now also lives. The main focus of his research is medical text analysis and most recently he has been working on predicting clinical impressions and other medical findings in radiology reports (see project page). More information also available on his website.

Ajay Kumar

Ajay is presently studying for his PhD in Computer Science and AI, where he is researching object recognition algorithms that can generalize across a number of modalities/pathologies. Also as part of his research, he is investigating Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), and how they can be used to impute/augment image data in sparse datasets. Ajay works for Amazon Web Services (AWS) in the UK, where he has helped AWS’ healthcare clients leverage AI/ML to innovate, including developing AI-supported diagnostic pathology, and patient support capabilities. He previously worked for the NHS, helping digitise the pathology function for one of the trusts. He has previous degrees from Oxford and Cambridge, and completed his first degree in robotics engineering.

Johannes Zelger

Johannes is currently studying for a PhD in Computer Science at the University of St Andrews supervised by Dr David Harris-Birtill and Dr Devesh Dhasmana. As part of the Deep Lungs project he focuses his research on the detection and classification of complex respiratory disease using Deep Learning.

Before beginning his PhD, Johannes completed his MSc in Artificial Intelligence in St Andrews after working as an IT Consultant for two years where he helped clients based in Germany to digitalize processes and support decision making processes by creating innovative financial planning tools.

Craig Myles

Craig is currently working toward a PhD in Computer Science with supervision from Dr David Harris-Birtill and Dr David Harrison. Craig holds a first-class BSc in Computer Science and graduated from MSc Digital Health with Distinction from St Andrews University in 2021.

Craig’s research primarily focuses on the classification, staging, and treatment stratification of colorectal cancer with particular focus on treatment responses to fluoropyrimidine and platinum therapies. The main objectives of his research are to explore the use of various computer vision and deep learning techniques to classify colorectal cancer whole slide histopathology images and to stratify response to various treatment plans.

(Virtual) Team Photo