Blackpool man's team launches AI research programme to speed leukaemia diagnoses

A Fylde coast-born software engineer is aiming to use artificial intelligence to help speed up diagnosis of an aggressive form of cancer.
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Adam Milton-Barker is apart of a world wide team of scientists and computer experts who have founded the Peter Moss Leukaemia Artificial Intelligence Research Association.

It is named after his grandfather who died after contracting Acute Myeloid Leukaemia in 2018.

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Peter was an engineer at Blackpool sports cars firm TVR and when he was told of his diagnosis was given just weeks to live.

Adam, who is part of computer chip company Intel’s Software Innovator programme and has worked on various schemes using AI and the Internet of Things, said he had been researching how AI could be used to speed up diagnoses ever since.

He had previously worked on a Computer Vision (Artificial Intelligence) project to detect a form of breast cancer known as Invasive Ductal Carcinoma from mammogram images.

Adam said: “I reached out to a Facebook group where the project came to the attention of a professor at Kansas State University in the USA, Ho Leung Ng, who was also a leukaemia survivor himself.

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"He was able to point me in the direction of an important microscope leukaemia image dataset and research papers describing how to analyse this dataset.

"This became the foundation for our leukaemia classification work. Our team grew, and now we are a team of volunteers with experience in the Internet of Things, Computer Vision / Natural Language Processing, Leukaemia research, Biochemistry, Molecular Biophysics, Immunology, and Bioinformatics.”

He said that all their work was being shared on the international free code sharing and publishing service GitHub and the team won the Intel DevMesh AI Spotlight award for its work so far.

He added: “With Intel we have demonstrated our proof of concept at Embedded World in Germany. During 2019, we attracted researchers and developers throughout the globe and are working on a student program.”

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Adam, a former Hambleton Primary and King Edward pupil whose grandparents ran the Stretton Hotel, said they are now launching a crowdfunding site to raise money for the next stages of the work.

Anyone interested in getting involved can visit: https://www.gofundme.com/f/leukemia-research-foundation

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