After a successful master thesis in the attoworld team, Lea Gigou has decided to stay with us for her PhD. In her master thesis, Lea investigated factors beyond disease status that affect the performance of a medical test based on infrared molecular fingerprinting for the detection of cancer. She designed and applied a rigorous method based on medical statistics and machine learning to assess the effect of the so-called covariates. Her master thesis is available here.

For her PhD, Lea has accepted a different challenge. Part of her planned research focuses on answering fundamental questions relevant to medical decision-making. By drawing on probability and information theory, Lea will develop and test a general approach for quantifying the information content of different medical data sets and a way of cross-comparing their efficacy. In particular, medical information from different sources, such as clinical laboratory panels, proteomics profiles, infrared fingerprints, will be cross-compared based on their capacity to precisely defining the health state of individuals and capturing signals of transitions from wellness to disease. The quantification of medical information carried by health data is the key to assessing their utility for healthcare.