Celebrating Mathematics and Statistics Awareness Month with Dr. Ben Lopez

Hello all, I’m Ben Lopez and I’m a Principal Mathematician at IBEX Innovations.

The goal of IBEX is to support clinicians’ decision-making by improving the image quality of X-rays and extracting biomarkers from X-ray images. To celebrate mathematics and statistics awareness months, I thought I would take the opportunity to talk a bit about the role of mathematics and statistics in IBEX.

My background

A bit about me, I started my training as a mathematician completing my undergrad at Durham University. I then transferred to Bayesian statistics and was awarded a PhD for my thesis entitled “A Bayes Linear Approach to Making Inferences With X-rays”.?

Although I identify as both a mathematician and a statistician, I’d say I’m much better at the latter. When I started my career it was as a research associate in uncertainty quantification at Durham University working on arrhythmia detection in cardiac intensive care units.?

Fast-forward to 2022 and I’ve now been working with IBEX for over 7 years. They sponsored my PhD which laid some of the foundations for IBEX’s Trueview technology and, after a brief hiatus in academia, I returned and now lead a team of four people.?

We mainly work on Bayesian inverse problem solving for scatter correction and bone health applications, classical inverse problem solving for 3D reconstruction, and image processing for image quality. I am also involved in planning clinical trials, identifying future technological opportunities, and bone health economics. I tend to get involved in anything involving data, uncertainties, or models.???

The role of mathematics and statistics in IBEX’s technologies

Mathematics is an abstract science manipulating numbers and rules to create proofs. It’s like art, it need not be useful but it is very clever and in some sense beautiful. Statistics is the process of helping people make better decisions under uncertainty.?

Statistics connects mathematics to people’s decisions and tries to answer the question: what do these abstract models tell you about the real world? In Trueview, we use mathematics to create powerful monte carlo physics models that can simulate an X-ray traversing human anatomy and then statistics to learn what that simulation is telling us about an actual patient.

Mathematics gives us a language to encode what people think and statistics tells us how that “should” change when we observe data. Trueview (IBEX’s core technology) is founded on Mathematics and statistics. It’s unimaginable that it could exist in a recognisable form without them.

Predictions for the future…

I predict that the use of statistics and mathematics will not change at a fundamental level. Their roles will be the same and the reasons for using them will be unchanged. What will change is that they will be used to extract more and more information from X-ray images in more and more imaginative ways.

In two years, 3D reconstructions from 2.5D tomosynthesis images. In 5 years, 3D reconstructions from 2D images and further mathematical modelling (for example, to assess the strength of a patient’s bones to different stresses). In 10 years, holographic representations of a patient’s chests above their beds in ICU (I jest more than a little with this one).

The most honest prediction is that my prediction above is going to be wrong. Mathematics and statistics are so powerful and flexible that even conceiving what they will be used for in 10 years' time is a fool's errand. Only time will tell but I am sure it will be astounding.