Omar Choudhry

Profile

Omar is currently undertaking an integrated PhD and MSc course at the University of Leeds, specialising in Artificial Intelligence for Medical Diagnosis and Care. He was awarded the highly competitive EPSRC Fully Funded Studentship Awards for Session 2023/24, which cover the full cost of university fees and maintenance, making him the youngest postgraduate researcher on the course to date. He previously completed a BSc in Computer Science with Artificial Intelligence (2020-2023), graduating with First Class Honours. His undergraduate dissertation focused on Survival Analysis with Neural Networks for Chronic Heart Failure Patients. He achieved a Distinction in his MSc in Artificial Intelligence for Medical Diagnosis and Care (2023-2025), where his dissertation looked at Surgical Tool Detection and Tracking in Laparoscopic Surgical Training Datasets in Low- and Middle- Income Countries. His doctoral research now centres on AI-driven surgical skill training in resource-constrained environments.

Within his doctoral studies, Omar has achieved recognition at various academic events. He won the Thesis Sharing Competition at the University of Bradford for the best thesis summary and received the Best Cohort Spotlight Award at his first conference presentation at the Annual CDT Conference in Leeds. He also secured first place for the Best Pitch at the Annual CDT Retreat in 2024 and was awarded the Best Presentation prize at the Doctoral Consortium of the prestigious 29th Conference on Medical Image Understanding and Analysis. He also frequently partakes in interdisciplinary and clinical collaboration with multiple partnerships to date. This extends to professional memberships with MICCAI, IEEE, BCS, IET, ALSGBI and BAPES.

Beyond academia, Omar has held senior roles including Chief AI Scientist and Lead Full Stack Developer at an AI Edutech startup. His professional experience includes work with the United Nations International Computing Centre (UNICC), Discover Financial Services, and Chelsea and Westminster Hospital NHS Foundation Trust. He is also a Director of OC Solutions Ltd, a company providing bespoke information technology, software solutions, and consultancy services across multiple domains. In addition, Omar has extensive teaching, tutoring, and volunteering experience in schools and organisations internationally, including King Saud University in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia through the prestigious Mawhiba programme, which admits only the most exceptional students in the Middle East.

Research interests

Omar’s PhD research focuses on Surgical Skill Improvement through AI-driven Training Enhancements. The Lancet Commission on Global Surgery (LCGS) in 2015 highlighted the urgent need for increased volume and quality of surgery as an indispensable component of global health. It has been estimated that 11% of deaths in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) are due to conditions treatable by surgery. 80% of these deaths are preventable as they are caused by the lack of surgeons, consisting of cases that require only general surgical emergencies such as surgical site infections or trauma. Current training camps for laparoscopic surgery in the UK are performed in a 1-to-1 nature, a trainer will spend around an hour with a trainee before they are required to practice alone with little to no oversight. To speed up this training process, an AI system able to analyse the trainees’ skills from a recorded video feed and provide them with feedback could reduce the learning curve and increase the throughput of surgical trainees. In this project, the aim is to produce an automated skill assessment system that allows tracking of the skill levels of trainees. The skill feedback will be analysed on a sub-task basis and highlight tasks where they may focus their training.

Qualifications

• MSc Artificial Intelligence for Medical Diagnosis and Care (Predicted: Distinction)
• BSc Computer Science with Artificial Intelligence, University of Leeds (First Class Honours)

Research groups and institutes

• Artificial Intelligence