Centre for Doctoral Training: AI for Medical Diagnosis and Care
The UKRI CDT in AI for Medical Diagnosis and Care is now in its fifth year. The Centre is led and hosted by the University of Leeds and is founded on a close partnership with the Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust. It has found its excellent home in both the Sir William Henry Bragg Building and LIDA, where its students benefit from the opportunity to build a truly interdisciplinary network of highly talented researchers. The CDT was set up in April 2019 and the first cohort started on 1st October 2019. Over its lifetime, the Centre has recruited over 50 researchers, and has welcomed our fifth cohort in September 2023.
Our students come from a variety of mainly STEM backgrounds, ranging from computer science, maths, and physics to bioengineering. In their first year, students complete 12 months of an 18-month MSc programme, and during that year, they select their PhD topic from a list of proposed projects. In 2022, the CDT invited over 100 potential supervisors in the University and NHS to submit project proposals for Cohort 4. These students completed their PhD-related MSc projects in September 2023, having made a successful start with their PhD work. The overall CDT programme leads to an integrated PhD/MSc in AI for Medical Diagnosis and Care.
The Centre organised the UKRI CDTs on AI for Health Joint Conference, which took place in York in May 2023. This was an outstanding opportunity for our CDT students to showcase their work and make connections outside the University. Our own CDT conference was also held in June 2023 in Nexus, highlighting the research of students and providing a networking opportunity for everyone involved with the CDT. In Nov 2022 our cohort 1, 2 and 3 students attended a retreat at Weetwood Hall in Leeds.
Our CDT AI students have presented their work at a range of national and international conferences, including the Medical Image Computing and Computer Assisted Intervention Society (MICCAI) 2023 Conference in Vancouver, SPIE Medical Imaging 2023 in San Diego, the Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2023) in New Orleans, and the UK Healthcare Text analytics conference in Manchester. In addition, the CDT students have participated in a number of outreach events, such as In2Science Summer Placement to promote social mobility and diversity in STEM, Child Friendly Leeds Live, Be Curious 2023, and Radiotherapy and Artificial Intelligence Dragons’ Den.