Carleton Student is Bringing AI into Healthcare

Carleton student explores how to incorporate AI into the healthcare world.

Growing up in Abeokuta, a city in southwestern Nigeria, Precious Kolawole always knew she would pursue higher education. With older siblings studying engineering and finance, Kolawole set her sights on medicine, a respected and familiar path in many Nigerian households.

But in 2020, her plans took a new direction. Her brother Steven had attended a conference where he heard Nigerian ophthalmologist and tech entrepreneur Dr. Stephen Odaibo speak about RETINA-AI, a company using artificial intelligence to detect eye diseases. When he shared what he’d learned, something clicked for Kolawole.

“That moment changed my life,” she says. “I realized you can apply AI technology to health issues and help solve problems that way.”

At the time, Kolawole was studying medical rehabilitation at Nigeria’s Obafemi Awolowo University, having worked for three years after high school to afford tuition. But inspired by the possibilities of AI in healthcare, she began teaching herself Python, joined She Code Africa, and started participating in hackathons. One of her teams won a competition in Tanzania by developing a machine learning model to help detect breast cancer from medical imaging.

In 2022, after being named Nigeria’s top female data scientist with the Ms. Algorithm Award, Kolawole applied to universities around the world. That summer, she moved to Ottawa to begin a computer science degree at Carleton University.

Finding her place at Carleton

Kolawole quickly immersed herself in campus life. She joined Carleton’s Dev Degree program, which combines academic study with paid work experience, and also took on a role as a teaching assistant. Determined to make the most of her time, she enrolled in more than the standard course load and took summer classes, aiming to complete her four-year honours degree in just three years.

“I’m just really ambitious,” she says. She credits Carleton’s welcoming environment, along with support from Ottawa’s Nigerian community and a local church, for helping her feel at home in Canada.

Kolawole’s passion for combining health and technology led her to approach biology professor Jeff Dawson after he mentioned undergraduate research opportunities. Though she was majoring in computer science, she expressed her interest in medicine. Dawson connected her with a project led by graduate student Katie Wiebe, focused on improving diagnostic techniques for concussions using eye-tracking data.

Kolawole’s role was to develop an algorithm that could analyze videos of eye movement to determine whether a person had suffered a mild traumatic brain injury. The project became her honours research.

“Precious’s software has helped us measure each patient’s eye movement and evaluate its usefulness as a classifier,” says Systems and Computer Engineering researcher Andy Adler, one of her supervisors. “She’s able to rapidly transform examples and suggestions into working prototype machine learning software. Precious also has an amazing ability to handle lots of tasks at the same time.”

Looking ahead

Now approaching the final year of her degree, Kolawole is the recipient of a Black and Indigenous Summer Research Internship from Carleton’s Faculty of Science. Her current project involves using generative adversarial networks (GANs) to refine ultrasound images, making them easier for doctors to interpret.

After graduation, she plans to continue working in software and is also exploring future academic opportunities that combine AI and medicine.

“When you aspire to do something and the dots aren’t connecting, you have to be persistent,” she says. “Use all of the resources the world has given you and dedicate your time and effort to what you want to achieve.”