About Me

I am a computer scientist by training and hold a Senior Research Fellow position at the UCL Institute of Ophthalmology with an honorary appointment at Moorfields Eye Hospital. Enjoying the world’s largest ophthalmic bioresource via INSIGHT Health Data Research Hub, I aim to develop instances of medical AI that will not only generalize well to new data in dynamic and heterogeneous healthcare environments but also ensure the safety and well-being of stakeholders.

For a quick dive into what is possible when AI meets medicine, I urge you to take a look at our recent paper: A foundation model for generalizable disease detection from retinal images. We will keep supercharging AI for ophthalmology and beyond through our new project: From 2 million to 20 million: scaling and validating a foundation model for ophthalmology, which has been funded through the UKRI call for Artificial Intelligence Innovation to Accelerate Health Research (funding number: EP/Y017803/1). I am a Researcher/Co-Investigator on the project.

Before moving to London, I performed my research activities at the Institute for Ophthalmic Research in Tübingen, Germany, where we developed deep neural networks (DNNs) for detecting prevalent eye diseases and conditions, such as diabetic retinopathy (DR), age-related macular degeneration (AMD) and epiretinal membrane (ERM), from retinal fundus photographs or optical coherence tomography (OCT) scans. We also studied their clinical relevance in terms of diagnostic uncertainty and interpretability. Last but not least, we shed light on DNNs’ gender prediction mystery by demonstrating structural but localized differences between the male and female retinae.

During my time in beautiful Tübingen, I was privileged to work with master and PhD students, as well. We published the results of our studies at leading venues for biomedical image analysis. Thanks to my engagement in review and rebuttal cycles, I also received the Outstanding Reviewer award from the International Conference on Medical Imaging with Deep Learning (MIDL) in 2020.

Prior to the researcher positions described above, I briefly worked as an Assistant Professor at the Department of Computer Engineering at Isik University in Istanbul, Turkey upon the completion of my PhD research in 2015 at the Center for Advanced Computer Studies (CACS) at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. In my research, I focused on computerized diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease from neuroimages, e.g., MRI or PET scans.

Before all that magic above, I received my BSc. (3rd rank) and MSc. degrees from the Department of Computer Engineering at Baskent University in 2004 and 2007, respectively.