Dr Weiqi Liao, Primary Care (WP6)

Weiqi Liao is a Data Scientist working with Professor Julia Hippisley-Cox in the Nuffield Department of Primary Care Health Sciences., University of Oxford. He was trained in China and the UK, with a mixed educational background in Epidemiology, Biostatistics, Population Health, and Health Services Research.

Weiqi was awarded a full ESRC 1+3 (international) studentship (advanced quantitative methods) and used data from health records to study primary care pathways in a population at high risk of developing lung cancer in his PhD. He is excited to participate in the DART project, as a continuity of his PhD. He works in the primary care part of WP6, using linked electronic health records (EHRs) from the QResearch database to study the disease trajectory of patients diagnosed with lung cancer. He also contributes to the development and validation of personalised risk prediction models that could be used to estimate individual patient’s risk of getting lung cancer. Using personalised risk prediction models to identify individuals at the highest risk of developing lung cancer from the population and referring them to do the targeted lung health checks (TLHC) and/or low-dose CT (LDCT) screening could be a cost-effective approach to improve early diagnosis and survival outcomes of lung cancer.

Besides the DART project, Weiqi also leads in conducting other cancer projects in primary care at Oxford, including pancreatic cancer (ADEPTS project, funded by Pancreatic Cancer UK) and hepatocellular carcinoma (liver cancer, DeLIVER project, funded by Cancer Research UK). He is interested in using real-world data in research for early cancer diagnosis and improving patient outcomes and linked electronic health records (EHRs) to study disease trajectory, identify risk factors, establish prediction models, to promote early diagnosis and improve prognosis in cancer.

Dr Weiqi Liao works on the primary care stream of Work Package 6 Primary Care / Population Health and Health Economics.