Jenny Yang is pursuing a DPhil in Engineering Science at the University of Oxford, where she is specialising in the field of clinical artificial intelligence (AI). Jenny’s quest to apply technology in different medical fields to improve patient care began as an undergraduate at the University of British Columbia (UBC), which she earned with distinction, where she was a Chancellor’s Scholar and on the Dean’s Honour List before furthering her studies with a Master of Science in Bioinformatics also at UBC.
Now a DPhil student at the University of Oxford’s Institute of Biomedical Engineering Department, Jenny has made rapid progress on a major contribution to COVID-19 research. The models she has developed have been shown to be able to identify the presence or absence of COVID-19 from routinely-acquired data in the Emergency Departments (ED) of Oxford University Hospitals. Her project addresses the urgent need for real-time systems that can help ED clinicians determine where to send a patient when they present to the ED: depending on whether a patient is deemed to have COVID-19, they can be sent to areas of the hospital with high or low “infection control”. Jenny’s work has been shown to outperform lateral flow tests and clinical judgement, approaching the effectiveness of PCR tests. Her approach works instantaneously and is now being implemented in a prospective evaluation study within Oxford University Hospitals.
Jenny’s work builds on her Master of Science programme at UBC where she developed an image-based deep learning workflow to detect, identify and quantify features across different cancer types.
Jenny’s interest in clinical AI began during her first internship at the BC Cancer Agency’s Genome Sciences Centre (GSC). Here, she used machine learning to detect the most important genes in the classification of different cancer types. During her time there, she saw first-hand how machine learning could be used to advance our understanding of both basic science and personalized health assessment and care.
After completing her DPhil, Jenny plans to continue to pursue research in clinical AI and to collaborate with industrial partners to translate AI research into tangible healthcare tools. Additionally, through her training, she hopes to bridge the gap between different healthcare systems and develop effective methods for collaboration and implementation across Canada.
– Awarded The Victor Dahdaleh Foundation Scholarship, 2021-2022
