Background
In March 2023 we ran a workshop with seven people with experience of radiotherapy and two CRUK RadNet City of London funded researchers, Dr Catarina Veiga and Dr Adam Szmul. The focus of the workshop was exploring where patients currently access information about research and how they would like to see research shared. You can read more about this here https://crukradnet.colcc.ac.uk/2023/05/09/how-can-we-share-research-together/
Part 2 of the project
Following this workshop we felt compelled to act on what the patient representatives had told us and try to make research more accessible for a lay audience. We decided to take one of the researchers’ recently published papers https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1361-6560/acc921 and work with a smaller group of four patients from the initial workshop and graphic designer Gill Brown to co-create an accessible output. The research was focused on using artificial intelligence to improve the quality of scans acquired during radiotherapy, with the goal of making radiotherapy in children more precise.
We ran 3 more online workshops between June and November 2023 and co-created this information sheet:
The accessible information sheet summarises part of our research into radiotherapy and artificial intelligence. We also wanted to share the process and what we learned from this project. We’re currently writing about this to capture the perspectives of the people who took part in the project.
Using artificial intelligence (AI) to make radiotherapy in children more precise
One participant summed up the whole project perfectly:
“I just think this was a great initiative, ‘translating’ an entire research paper into an info sheet is not something I would have even considered possible. I’m very glad that we managed to have a successful outcome. I think a lot of research scientists will be surprised by this as well and may see opportunities for doing something similar”
We hope to encourage other RadNet researchers to work in similar ways and to incorporate in their science dissemination strategies to reach a broader patient and public audience.
We would like to thank everyone who participated in the this project: Holly Spencer, Steve Oliver, Jagdish Bains, Katharine Gignac, Gill Brown, Adam Szmul, Catarina Veiga and Lisa Whittaker.
