Dr. Hamish S F Fraser

PERSONAL DETAILS

Born: 19 May 1962

Nationality: British

Address: 16 Hill Street, Somerville, MA, 02144, USA.

Telephone, work: 617 258 8996

Email:         hamish@medg.lcs.mit.edu 

Home Page: http://medg.lcs.mit.edu/hamish/home.htm

1997: USMLE parts I and II (1996 and 1997), ECFMG Certificate

1991: M.Sc Knowledge Based Systems, Edinburgh University

1990: MRCP Edinburgh

1986: MB ChB, Edinburgh University

1984: B.Sc. Med. Sci/Physiology, Edinburgh University

EDUCATION

1973 - 74: Dr Challoner's Grammar School, Amersham, Bucks, England.

1974 - 79: The Marr College, Troon, Ayrshire, Scotland.

1979 - 80: Langside College, Prospecthill Road, Glasgow, Scotland.

School qualifications

Highers: English, Maths, Biology, Physics, Chemistry, Geography (all A)

A Levels: Physics: A, Chemistry: A, Biology: B.

Prizes: Science: 1975 ,Chemistry: 1976, Physics: 1977

1980 - 1986: Main Degree: MB ChB

1982 - 1983: B.Sc. Hons. Medical Science (Physiology)

Dissertation: ``The Comparative Physiology of the Basal Ganglia.''

Research fellow in the Divisions of Clinical Decision Making and Cardiology, Tufts-New England Medical Center (50%)

Research affiliate in the Clinical Decision Making Group at the Laboratory for Computer Science of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (50%).

I have spent two and a half years working on the Heart Disease Program, a large expert system (based on a modified Bayesian Belief Network) to assist with the diagnosis of heart disease. During that time we have increased the knowledge base considerably, adding new diseases from cardiology and general medicine in the light of the evaluation work.

I have designed, set-up and performed a clinical trial of the Heart Disease Program with physicians (mainly residents) at the New England Medical Center. We developed the user interface as a Web site to allow physicians to access the program over the Internet. 130 cases have been directly entered by participating physicians and 50 entered over the Internet from around the world, many by cardiologists. This work has been presented at the American Medical Informatics Association and will be presented at the American College of Cardiology and the British Cardiac Society meetings. The work will form the basis for an MD thesis submission to Edinburgh University.

My second major area of work has been in using tools from machine learning and statistics to develop decision support tools from data. I started this area of work with Dr. Lee Kennedy in Edinburgh, developing models to predict the diagnosis of myocardial infarction in patients with chest pain. Currently I am continuing this work with Dr Bill Long and Chris Tsien a Medical/Doctoral student at MIT. We are exploring ways to optimise decision trees induction, improve generalisation of models over data collected in different countries and to deal with missing data. Recently I have been working with a Norwegian group on the application of Rough Set based algorithms to chest pain diagnosis.

I am currently receiving funding from the pharmaceutical company Pfizer to develop models that recognise adverse events in clinical trials. Currently techniques being applied to this problem include machine learning, logistic regression and backpropagation neural networks. We are particularly interested in trends over time, and the use of patterns in medication to predict adverse events.

Edinburgh Royal Infirmary, 1 Lauriston Place, Edinburgh, Scotland.

and Falkirk and District Royal Infirmary, Majors Loan, Falkirk, Scotland.

Cardiology, Edinburgh: Dr. Nicolas Boon and Dr. Hugh Miller

22 Months as a specialist cardiology registrar.

General Medicine, Falkirk: Dr. Stanley Wright and Dr. William Ruddell

1 year of very busy general medicine with emphasis on respiratory medicine and gastroenterology and initial training in echocardiography.

February to July 1992: Locum Registrar in Cardiology (5+ months)

The Freeman Hospital, Freeman Road, High Heaton, Newcastle.

Dr. Roderick Bexton and Dr. Janet McCoomb. general and invasive cardiology.

August 1989 to August 1990: Senior House Officer in Cardiology and Medicine

The Northern General Hospital, Sheffield, UK.

General Medicine: (6 months) under Professor D. Munro, with specialist interests in endocrinology and connective tissue disease.

Cardiology: (6 months) under Dr. David Oakley, general and invasive cardiology.

Stirling Royal Infirmary, Livilands Gate, Stirling, Scotland.

Under Dr. Sheila Reith and Dr. A. Clark. Experience in all areas of general medicine with particular emphasis on diabetes and endocrinology and gastroenterology..

August 1987 to July 1988: Senior House Officer in Medicine/Geriatrics

Falkirk and District Royal Infirmary, Majors Loan, Falkirk, Scotland.

Dr. William Ruddell, and Dr. John Miller

A busy post in general and geriatric medicine.

Department of Clinical Neuro-science, Western General Hospital, and

Ward 20, The Royal Infirmary, Edinburgh

February 1987 to August 1987, General Medicine Wards 28 and 31,

The Royal Infirmary, Edinburgh.

3 years general professional training as SHO. I year general medicine as a registrar. Specialist units included diabetes and endocrinology, respiratory medicine, gastroenterology, neurology and geriatric medicine.

Cardiac catheterisation: 300 + Left, 50 Right (Sheffield, Newcastle, Edinburgh)

Pacemaker implantation: 60 +

Invasive electro-physiology: 10+ procedures

Echocardiography: reporting 20+ per week for 18 months, 200+ personally performed

(full details of cardiac procedures should be available shortly)

12 lead ECG, 24hr tape and ECG stress rest reporting, extensive experience.

Other procedures: chest drains, lumbar puncture, central lines, pleural drainage, sigmoidoscopy. ACLS certified.

Clinical teaching of Tufts medical students.

Echocardiography interpretation sessions (joint)

I have an ECFMG certificate and plan to upgrade my visa to increase my clinical involvement. I will sit the USMLE part 3 in May 1998 (which allows more flexibility with visas).

This was a one-year M.Sc., comprising a 6-month project and the following courses:

Knowledge representation and Inference (parts I&II)

Programming in Lisp

Programming in Prolog

Machine vision

Computational vision

Expert systems

Neural Networks

This project involved building a large computer program that enabled qualitative models of physical or biological systems to be created and run. Several models of cardiac physiology were built. The modelling system was programmed in Prolog and based on QSIM (developed by Ben Kuipers).

1995: Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs

1996: Knowledge Based Systems

1996: Introduction to Interactive Programming - user interfaces and networks programming taught in Java

1997: Medical Computing

1996: Regression Analysis - 2 week intensive course taught by Stanley Lemeshow (Tufts)

1996: Security and Confidentiality of Medical Records, a two-day conference run by the Harvard Community Health Plan. (Harvard)

1996: The Electronic Medical Record, a two-day course run by the Center for Clinical Computing at the Beth Israel Hospital, Boston (Harvard)

1997: IBM sponsored weekend course in Java programming (MIT)

1997: Echocardiography: Reading with the Experts, two day course run by Dr. Pandian from the New England Medical Center (Tufts)

1997: The Design Team of the Future, course on the impact of new technologies on design (MIT Sloan Management School)

Java

Lisp/Scheme

Databases including Access, ODBC/JDBC

HTML/Web site construction

Prolog

Basic

Statistical tools (JMP, SAS, Matlab)

Hamish S F Fraser, R. Lee Kennedy, Peter Ross, Robert Harrison.

Presented at the International Conference of Expert Systems and Neural Networks in Medicine, Plymouth, UK, August 1994.

Kennedy R.L., Burton A, Fraser H.S., McStay L, Harrison

Kennedy R.L., Burton A, Fraser H.S., McStay L, Steedman D.J.,

Fox K.A.A. British Cardiac Society, May 1995.

Kennedy R.L., Fraser H.S., Burton A, McStay L, Harrison R.F., Steedman D.J., Fox K.A.A. European Cardiac Society, September 1995

R. Lee Kennedy, A M Burton, W G Hamer, L N McStay, J McIntyre, H S F Fraser, K A A Fox, R F Harrison, European Cardiac Society September 1995.

Kennedy R.L., Harrison R.F., Fraser H.S., Burton A, McStay L, Fox K.A.A., Woods K.L. European Cardiac Society, September 1995

Hamish S F Fraser, William J Long, Shapur Naimi

Presented to the AAAI symposium on Artificial Intelligence Applications in Health Care, Stanford, March 1996.

William J. Long, Hamish Fraser, Shapur Naimi

Comparing Complex Diagnoses: A Formative Evaluation of the Heart Disease Program

Hamish S F Fraser, William J Long, Shapur Naimi

William J. Long, Hamish Fraser, Shapur Naimi, James Stahl

Christine L Tsien, Hamish S F Fraser

Presented at the American College of Cardiology Dearborn Summit:

LRTree: a hybrid technique for classifying myocardial infarction data containing unknown attribute values.

Christine L Tsien, Hamish S F Fraser, Isaac S Kohane

Christine L Tsien, Hamish S F Fraser, William J Long, R Lee Kennedy

Hamish S F Fraser, William J Long, Shapur Naimi

Hamish S F Fraser, William J Long, Shapur Naimi.

Milos Hauskrecht, Hamish Fraser

Hamish S F Fraser, Isaac S Kohane, William J Long

British Medical Journal, No 7094 Volume 314 Saturday 31 May 1997 P 1600-4

Full text of the article on the BMJ website:

Reasoning Requirements for Diagnosis of Heart Disease

W. J. Long, H. Fraser, and S. Naimi,
Artificial Intelligence in Medicine 10 (1997) pp. 5 - 24

An Artificial Neural Network System For Diagnosis Of Acute Myocardial Infarction (AMI) In The Accident And Emergency Department: Evaluation And Comparison With Serum Myoglobin Measurements.

Kennedy RL, Harrison RF, Burton AM, Fraser HS, Hamer WG, MacArthur D, McAllum R, Steedman DJ,

Comput Methods Programs Biomed 1997 Feb;52(2):93-103

Early Diagnosis of Acute Myocardial Infarction Using Clinical and Electrocardiographic Data at Presentation: Derivation and Evaluation of Logistic Regression Models

R.L. Kennedy, A.M. Burton, H.S. Fraser, L.N. McStay, R.F. Harrison

European Heart Journal, Vol. 17, August 1996, p1181 - 91

H S F Fraser

The Lancet, vol. 340: Sept. 26, 1992, pp 784.

Lecture: "Electronic Medical Record Systems" to students on the Tufts University combined degree course in Medicine and Health Care Management (MD/MBA), August 1997.

Lecture: "Developing Medical Decision Support Tools with Logistic Regression" to the Graduate Course 6.872 in Medical Computing at MIT, February 1998.

I provided data, examples and logistic support for the Medical Computing Course Class projects at MIT, 1997.

I jointly organise the Boston Informatics Research Trainees joint lecture series combining the seven NLM funded centers in the Boston area. I also built the course web site and moderate the mailing list.

I participate in the clinical teaching of Tufts University medical students and supervision of students at MIT.

 

1997-1998: Data-analysis tools for assessing the diagnostic accuracy of the Heart

                    Disease Program written in Java.

1995: A database and reporting tools for Coronary Care, developed using MS Access.

1991: A program to model physiological systems in Prolog (MSc project).

1985: A program to diagnose visual field defects written in Basic (student elective).

1997: Re-design of the Society for Medical Decision Making Web Site.
            (now moved to Goerge Washington University)

1997: Simple decision support tools to illustrate the article on chest pain diagnosis (referenced below). http://medg.lcs.mit.edu/cardiac/cpain.htm

1997: Java applets to display vital signs and laboratory data from clinical trials.                                          c               http://medg.lcs.mit.edu/hamish/demo/vitals.htm

1996: I constructed and maintain the Boston Informatics Research Trainees (BIRT) web site and mailing list http://medg.lcs.mit.edu/BIRT/birt.htm

I intend pursuing a career in medical Artificial Intelligence/Informatics with a particular emphasis on the application of these techniques to cardiology. Experience in the US suggests that researchers with both medical and computer science training are particularly productive in this field. Having completed the majority of my clinical training in cardiology and with experience and qualifications in AI/computing techniques, I am keen to continue working in both Informatics and Cardiology. My first priority is to complete the trial of the Heart Disease Program. I will submit this work for a British MD thesis (similar to a PhD) which can be based on work performed abroad.

Photography, travel (32 countries so far...), Scuba diving, sailing, hill walking, wildlife and conservation, cooking Scottish food including (the first?) kosher haggis, politics, and a variety of ethnic music and dances, not all of them Scottish.