Dr Yukun Zhou receives prestigious Wellcome Early-Career Award

Dr Yukun Zhou, a Research Fellow at the UCL Institute of Ophthalmology, Hawkes Institute, and Honorary Research Fellow at the Biomedical Research Centre at Moorfields Eye Hospital, has received a prestigious Wellcome Early-Career Award.

The five-year fellowship will help support Dr Zhou’s research, which investigates how artificial intelligence (AI) can be used to analyse medical data for quicker diagnoses and more personalised care.

Dr Zhou said: “I am truly honoured to receive the Wellcome Early-Career Award. It is a wonderful recognition of the work so far, and a huge encouragement to keep pushing the boundaries of what AI can do for healthcare. I am excited about the journey ahead and the opportunity to make a real difference for patients, working with fantastic collaborators within UCL’s vibrant research environment.”

About the project

The research project aims to transform how we use AI in healthcare by developing powerful “foundation models” – large AI systems that can learn from huge amounts of medical data and be used in many different clinical applications.

Just as ChatGPT learned from billions of words to understand language, medical foundation models learn from real clinical data such as scans, reports, and test results. These models will help doctors diagnose and predict disease more accurately and earlier, offer personalised treatment recommendations, and even find new patterns that may signal the early stages of illness. The project uses eye health as a starting point, given that the eye offers a unique window into overall health, and will also explore how eye scans can help detect risks of systemic diseases like ischaemic stroke and Parkinson’s disease.

Over the next five years, the project will build and test new ways to use multi-modal clinical data, including images, clinical letters, examination records, to develop powerful medical foundation models that understand complex medical situations like a clinician would. Dr Zhou will develop new training methods and tools to make sure these models generalise well across medical sites with different populations, disease presentations, and imaging devices.

By improving how we use diverse clinical datasets, this project will help build fairer and more reliable AI systems for healthcare, with a particular focus on supporting underserved patient groups and rare conditions.

The newly developed AI systems will be turned into prototypes that can be used in real-world settings, such as community screening for eye disease and identifying people at risk of major health events like strokes or heart attacks. These tools will be designed with input from patients and the public, with clear explanations and user-friendly interfaces.

By the end of the project, Dr Zhou aims to deliver AI tools that are not only scientifically advanced but also on the path to being practical, safe, and easy to understand, ready to help improve lives in NHS clinics and beyond.

Links

• Dr Yukum Zhou’s academic profile
• Q&A with Dr Yukum Zhou, recipient of the 2024 Institute of Ophthalmology Research Excellence Award.
• Wellcome Trust Early-Career Awards