Those trends continue in his current research. As Director of the NHS Kernow Datalab, he is leading a team developing AI and machine learning techniques to improve emergency services and health outcomes for respiratory patients. Funded by the Health and Care Research Wales, he is looking at ways to apply machine learning techniques to predict responses to chemotherapy in metastatic breast cancer. Building on previous work, he is looking for patterns associated with polypharmacy in epilepsy patients. And he is looking at effective ways to update the BabyCheck app, which aims to improve early identification of severe illnesses in infants under the age of six months.
In addition to helping improve outcomes for patients generally, one of Shang-Ming’s key focuses is to enable clinicians to treat people as individuals. With such enormous banks of health data, that has always been a major challenge. The use of AI provides a means to overcome that, to identify patterns in the data that ensure people are not just treated as an average but as a unique individual. Through his teaching on the University’s postgraduate programmes, across the
Faculty of Health
and the
School of Engineering, Computing and Mathematics
, Shang-Ming also aims to foster among his students not only a love of their subject but also the vision to see where it could take them. It is the same grounding, the same inspiration, offered by his high school teachers right at the beginning of his academic journey.
During the course of our conversation, there are several words that pop up repeatedly. Passion. Inspiration. Luck. And, of course, fuzzy logic. I challenge him over his use of the word ‘luck’, instead suggesting that everything he has achieved is in fact down to hard work, but he corrects me.
“I was lucky to develop a vision very early on that the medical domain was perhaps the best area to apply AI techniques,” he says. “It has given me the opportunity to work alongside amazing people in truly multidisciplinary teams. And the work I am doing can make a genuine difference to people’s lives. I think that counts as being pretty lucky whatever way you look at it.”