Third Dx4LMICs conference

Most of us attended the third Diagnostics for Low- and Middle-Income Countries (Dx4LMICs) conference at Reuben College in Oxford over the last two days. I am a Fellow at Reuben College and helped our President, Professor Lord Lionel Tarassenko and several others, including Dylan Adlard, organise the conference.

It was the biggest conference the college has held to date with about 110-120 attendees and we had to close registration a few weeks before and had a waiting list. It was also the hottest conference we’ve ever had with the temperature being over 30°C outside and I am sure the hall was even hotter, or at least more humid.

Dylan Adlard put in a lot work helping to make the conference a success; he used his SSI Fellowship to pay for accommodation for around 20 PhD students from UCL so they could attend the conference and two poster prizes. He also ran a successful online workshop the day before the conference started looking at and understanding the available ECG datasets that researchers are using the train machine learning models to detect Chagas disease.

That said, the talks were not only very diverse but also very interesting. We heard about using machine learning to transcribe patient histories, bioengineering methods that let you run multiple PCR reactions in a single well, potentially making diagnostic tests much cheaper and faster and the detection of patient deterioration in Vietnam by machine learning models inspecting pulse oximeter data.

Hopefully we will run a fourth edition in 2026!