UK Biobank’s access team this week signed off the 1,000th approved research project since access to the resource began in 2012. The major achievement was only possible because of the hard work and commitment put in by the access & scientific teams split across the Coordinating Centre at Cheadle and UK Biobank colleagues at Nuffield Department of Population Health at Oxford University. It demonstrated the way in which UK Biobank is now being used extensively for a wide range of research around the world.
The 1,000th project was submitted by iHealthScreen in the USA, which will use eye images to develop automated systems to detect illnesses like diabetic retinopathy, age-related macular degeneration, stroke and cardiovascular disease. The vast quantity of available data in UK Biobank provides the impetus to develop lots of new machine learning techniques that were never possible before.
