Rachel Kuo

I studied medicine at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, and qualified in 2014. During medical school, I spent time as a visiting research scholar at Yale New Haven Hospital, Connecticut, and Miami Children’s Hospital, Florida. I then moved to Oxford to complete the Academic Foundation Programme from 2014 to 2016, working with Professor Dominic Furniss and Professor Dani Prieto-Alhambra on the epidemiology of Dupuytren’s disease using large-scale routinely collected data.

I undertook Core Surgical Training in the East of England before returning to the Thames Valley and Wessex deanery to begin specialist surgical training in Plastic Surgery in 2018. In 2019, I was appointed as an NIHR-funded Academic Clinical Fellow in Plastic Surgery. During this period, my research was supported by the British Society for Surgery of the Hand pump-priming fund and Oxfordshire Health Services Research Committee grants.

In 2023, I began an NIHR Doctoral Research Fellowship at the University of Oxford. I also held an honorary Research Fellowship from the Royal College of Surgeons of England 2023-2024. My DPhil examines the development, evaluation, and implementation of artificial intelligence tools for diagnostic decision-making in surgery, using scaphoid fracture diagnosis on wrist radiographs as a clinical exemplar.

Although AI systems are increasingly reported to achieve high diagnostic accuracy, their safe use in clinical practice depends on more than model performance alone. My work therefore focuses on the sociotechnical determinants of safe clinical AI: how diagnostic AI systems are developed and validated, how clinicians interact with AI predictions, how interface design shapes decision-making, and how patients and members of the public view the use of health data and AI in care.

This programme of work includes the development and validation of an AI tool for detecting scaphoid fractures on X-rays, mixed-methods evaluation of AI-assisted clinical decision-making, and qualitative and patient and public involvement research exploring stakeholder perspectives on clinical AI. Through this work, I aim to generate practical evidence to support the safe, responsible, and clinically useful implementation of AI tools in the NHS.

I am jointly supervised by Professor Dominic Furniss in NDORMS, Professor Bartlomiej Papiez in the Big Data Institute, Professor Gary Collins at the University of Birmingham, and Dr Liz Tutton in Oxford Trauma.