Funding from the Natural Science Foundation of Jiangsu Province for healthcare data desensitisation

Dr. Yujiang Wang, Research Scientist & Associated Head of Machine Learning Lab at OSCAR

Dr. Yujiang Wang has recently received funding support from the Natural Science Foundation (NSF) of Jiangsu Province, China, to lead a Young Scientist Programme for developing data desensitisation methods in healthcare, with Dr. Jessie Liu and Dr. Anshul Thakur as the project participants. This NSF program aims to provide funding support for early-career researchers to conduct fundamental scientific research in Jiangsu Province. The grant is considerably competitive, with 1,500 awarded projects out of more than 10,000 proposals this year.

The proposed three-year project will be mainly forged at the Digital Healthcare Group, Oxford Suzhou Centre for Advanced Research (OSCAR), in collaboration with Dr Anshul Thakur from the University of Oxford. It aims to address a crucial issue in the study of clinical AI, namely, sharing healthcare data of sensitive personal information for training deep neural networks (DNN). A data desensitisation framework will be developed to remove the sensitivity information in various types of clinical data while retaining the deep-learning utilities, so that the desensitised data can be more freely shared for learning AI models.