Using AI to Revolutionise Medicine: Professor Ana Namburete Features in Royal Institution Christmas Lectures

At the end of December, Pembroke Rokos Fellow and Tutor in Computer Science Professor Ana Namburete was featured as a guest on the annual Royal Institution Christmas Lectures. With the theme of the 2023 lectures focusing on “The Truth About AI”, Ana was invited to appear in the second episode of the series, as part of a discussion of how artificial intelligence can revolutionise healthcare.

Just a month before the lectures were aired, Ana was published as the lead and first author on a paper published in Nature on the brain’s maturation during pregnancy. She and her team used AI to produce the first digital atlas of the brain’s development in the womb, capturing ultrasound images from as early as 14 weeks. It was this that formed the focus of her appearance in the lectures, as she demonstrated exactly how AI had been invaluable in producing measures of brain growth and health from these images.

With the help of a volunteer from the audience, Ana first used a ‘phantom’ – a 3D model of a mother’s abdomen – to generate an ultrasound video of the fetus. This video, she explained, essentially showed a “slice” of the fetus’s brain. From these videos, AI can predict the position and orientation of the “slice” shown, and then combine these “slices” to form a single three-dimensional image of the brain. These images allow medical professionals to measure growth of individual brain regions, and, as a result, identify babies that may need extra support.

You can watch the full lecture series on BBC iPlayer for the rest of this year. To learn more about Ana’s research, read our full article here.

Paul Wilkinson Photography