 Hello, my name is Eilord and I work as a researcher at University College London. We've had a lockdown in the UK over the past two months due to the coronavirus pandemic. Like many of you, I have been baking quite a lot. So here I have a slice of freshly baked bread. Turns out that this slice is not only great for feeding my household, but can also help me tell you a story about our lungs. This bread is much like other bread. It's some kind of flour that makes up most of the bread and it has air pockets. So we can think of it as a part of somebody's lungs, where the white part and the air pockets represent the normal bits of that person's lungs, which allow that person to breathe in air to bring oxygen into the body. This bread also has seeds in it, however, which are tasty and I don't sell very much like in my bread. But the seeds can also represent maybe something a bit more dire. In our case, they represent disease that is growing in this patient's lung. We call this disease lung fibrosis. Fibrosis is basically when parts of the lung start to sort of stiffen up and the lung begins to lose its ability to draw in air efficiently. For example, people who smoke a lot are at higher risk of developing this type of disease. When someone presents with breathing problems at a hospital, what we often do is to take three-dimensional x-ray image of that patient's lungs. We call this a CT scan or a CAT scan. And similar to an x-ray of somebody's broken bones, this image actually allows us to look inside the lung and look for signs of disease. Now, if fibrosis is found in an image of a patient's lungs, we usually follow up with another scan of that person, perhaps half a year or a year later, to see how the disease has developed. And here we have another slice of bread to represent that follow-up scan. We'd now like to measure how extensive the disease is in both of these scans to see if the patient's treatment is working. It's kind of like asking someone to count off the seeds in these two slices of bread or rather the two whole loaves of bread that these slices belong to. Quite tedious. So for doctors who don't tend to have a lot of time on their hands, the best they can do is to get an overlook of the two images and give approximate answers. You might say something like 5, 10% increase in disease or that the disease is slightly worsening or stable. And they are very good at this. However, this is where computers can come in and help out. With me and my fellow group of researchers at UCL are working on is developing software that allows a computer to analyze these lung images and basically count up the number of disease image pixels. It's a tedious task, but the computer doesn't mind it. It just turns away looking at the whole image and in under a minute it gives us a number to represent the amount of disease on each image. This can give vital information to healthcare staff about the patient's disease and provides them with another tool to help them look after their patients. I hope you enjoyed this chat. I'm going to enjoy some freshly made bread. Thanks so much for listening.