WHEN Glasgow surgeon Campbell Roxburgh pulls on his charity fundraiser t-shirt, he thinks of his mum. Christine Roxburgh, a former GP, sadly died from oesophageal cancer when she was just 62. “My mum was taken too young,” says her son.
“I was just at the end of my PhD and training as a surgeon when she died. “She saw me graduate as a doctor, she was around when my first child was born - but now I have three children. There are so many more memories I would have like to have shared with her.
" He adds: "She had more life to live and that is the sadness of cancer.” Christine Roxburgh (Image: CRUK) Professor Roxburgh and his team at the University of Glasgow have been awarded more than half a million pounds to develop an AI tool which will improve treatment for people with rectal cancer, a type of bowel cancer. Around 4000 people are diagnosed with bowel cancer each year in Scotland .
The £505,414 grant from Stand Up to Cancer, a joint fundraising campaign by Cancer Research UK and Channel 4, will fund artificial intelligence technology which could predict more accurately who will respond to treatment by picking up tiny changes in tissue samples impossible to detect by the human eye. (Image: CRUK) The state-of-the-art technology may spare some people from having life-changing surgery. Kirkintilloch gran Irene Hannah was diagnosed with bowel cancer in 2019 after completing the screening test which is sent out to everyone aged between 50 and 74.
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