18 Dec 20. BHF Fellowship grant

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Dr Michelle Williams is a Senior Clinical Research Fellow at the Center for Cardiovascular Science & a Clinical Lecturer for the Edinburgh Imaging Academy.

Dr Williams has been awarded an Intermediate Clinical Research Fellowship from the British Heart Foundation. This will continue her existing work which is using imaging to identify patients who are at risk of heart attacks.

The £545,000 grant award will enable Dr Williams to develop a machine learning “algorithm” to detect undiagnosed coronary heart disease on computed tomography (CT) scans.

CT scans are used to diagnose a range of diseases, unrelated to the heart. However, there are often signs of heart disease on these scans.

Dr Williams will develop an automated way of finding & measuring these signs & linking them with other risk factors for heart disease. This would enable doctors to potentially treat patients before they have heart attacks.

We asked Dr Williams her thoughts on receiving the grant.

“I am delighted to have received this grant from the British Heart Foundation.

There is much work to be done to develop & test such an algorithm, but ultimately we would hope it could be used to spot the signs of coronary artery disease in clinical practice & identify patients who may otherwise be missed.”