Anna-Grace Linton

Research Topic: Predicted Long Term Outcomes following Cancer from early self-evaluated Quality of Survival

Supervisors: Professor Vania Dimitrova, Professor Adam Glaser, Dr Amy Dowling, Dr Richard Wagland (University of Southampton)

About Anna: Anna was the first student representative for the UKRI CDT for Artificial Intelligence for Medical Diagnosis and Care. She graduated from University of Bristol with a Masters in Neuroscience.

Project Description: Patient Reported Outcome Measures (PROMs) are patient self-reports which provide information on perceptions and experiences of treatment through Likert scales responses and free text comments. In assessing cancer survival, PROMs are an increasingly valuable tool to investigate the factors that influence the quality of survival of cancer patients. This has implications for long term outcomes such as health service utilisation and mortality.

My PhD project will apply Artificial Intelligence (AI) methods to PROMs datasets to produce predictive models for long term outcomes following cancer treatment. This will be enriched by automated analysis of the patients’ unstructured free text comments using natural language processing (NLP).

The project will further the understanding of the factors that are key predictors of outcomes of cancer patients and, in turn, improve survival and their quality of life following treatment.