Inês Dutra is the principal investigator of the AI4Health – Artificial Intelligence for Health Care, of the thematic line Health Data & Decision Sciences, & Information Technology, of CINTESIS.
Born and raised in Rio de Janeiro, she was hesitant about studying Health Science or Exact Sciences, but Computers spoke louder. She chose Mathematics (Computing modality), having completed her Master’s degree at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro in 1988. In 1995, she obtained a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Bristol, where she spent four years with a scholarship from the Brazilian government.
From 2001 to 2005, she was also a researcher at the Department of Biostatistics and Medical Informatics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA, where she started working in the medical field, specifically in breast cancer, where she says “there are still many things to do”.
In 2007, she decided to move to Portugal. Her husband, who is Portuguese, and the increasing insecurity felt on the skin, led her to the University of Porto, where she had worked as a researcher in 1996. She is currently an assistant professor at the Department of Computer Sciences of the Faculty of Sciences.
“My desire is to be a good teacher. I love to teach, to pass my knowledge on to other people. I am unable to enter a classroom to teach something I do not know very well. Research is a means of learning and disseminating results, but it also allows me to teach new things to my students, illustrating the theory with practical examples,” she says.
She worked at the Laboratory of Artificial Intelligence and Computer Science, then at INESC TEC, and now, she is at CINTESIS. “I expect to have joint projects with professionals working in the health area and convince them to collaborate. Without their contribution, our research serves no purpose”, she confesses.
As a researcher, she works at the frontier between Computer Science and medical applications, using logical programming methods. According to her own words, “the amount of information we have today to store is very large, dispersed and heterogeneous. Therefore, to work in this area, we have to adapt the algorithms and the methods, making them more efficient. ”
One of the applications she developed was MammoClass, an online tool that calculates the probability of a cancer being malignant or not from a report that can be written or dictated by the user. “In about 20% of the cases, biopsies are inconclusive. When this happens, patients do partial or total mastectomy. Our experiences with biopsy data indicate that it would be possible to minimize the number of patients who undergo partial or total mastectomy unnecessarily,” she says.
The model is constantly updated. Each time a person enters the platform and leaves their data, they are not only answering a personal question, but also helping to increase the database and improve the model. The goal is that it can be used by the general public and by health professionals. The adhesion is still, however, below expectations, something that does not come as a surprise to the researcher.
“This works on a top down policy. If people are not forced, they do not change. There is a certain skepticism, a resistance to change, because of the learning curve. I think this is the biggest problem and it will change with the younger generation. I think it’s a matter of time before technology is used, not to replace, but to help,” she concludes.
What is your 1-Year Ambition?
At the moment, I am involved in several health projects with colleagues from CINTESIS. I want to sow, to make known what we do in Artificial Intelligence so that people know how this can help them and make joint projects in decision support systems that contribute to improve health care.
What is your 10-Year Ambition?
I have many ideas, but I like to take one step at a time. If I have a dynamic workforce, the consequence will be the proliferation of projects. I hope to integrate technology into health processes, to aid decision making and so, support health professionals and improve health care.
How is life beyond research?
I hardly have spare time. My time is very dedicated to work because I like it. But I do not neglect my family. My daughter is already studying abroad. I dedicate much time to my son, who is 15 years old. I enjoy biking, going on picnics, going to the beach, and going to the mountain. You can easily find me at the zoo or at the city park. I also really like to read. Right now I’m reading Yuval Noah Harari’s “Sapiens – Brief History of Humanity,” and I find it very interesting.