Sara Jones

Research Topic: Using Behavioural AI for the Early Detection of Brain Cancer

Supervisors: Dr Ryan Matthews, Dr He Wang

About Sara: Sara graduated with a BSc in Computing from the University of Worcester in 2018 before pursuing an MSc (Eng.) in Mechatronics and Robotics at the University of Leeds.

Project Description: This PhD project aims to explore the feasibility of a custom behavioural AI tool as an early detector of a brain tumour. We propose that since brain cancer is a solid, structural lesion affecting a person’s most functionally eloquent organ, its presence will cause differences in language processing and cognition, and that this can be detected using AI techniques that are adequately trained to detect changes in personality, cognition, language processing (including voice and facial expressions) and prosodic and linguistic features of the patient’s speech. Using natural language processing techniques and Scaled Insights core neural net technology, survey answers, audio samples and transcripts will be analysed to generate markers pertaining to sample syntax, grammar, cohesion, discourse and content described.