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The BRCCH cordially invites you to the inaugural lecture of Prof Ece Özkan Elsen, who holds a BRCCH professorship in Paediatric Digital Health Data Analysis. In her talk, Prof Özkan Elsen will present her vision for AI models built for children rather than adapted from adults. 

While medical AI has transformed adult diagnostics, children have largely been left behind: most tools have been developed and validated in adults and transfer poorly to children, whose development and clinical needs differ fundamentally from those of adults.

She will describe how her group develops AI specifically for paediatric care from the outset, working with data that are limited, noisy, and distributed across medical imaging, laboratory values, and clinicians’ notes. Her work aims to build models that clinicians can interpret and trust, while ensuring that they remain robust and reliable in everyday clinical practice.

Drawing on her work in medical imaging and multimodal learning, she will show why child health calls for methods of its own, not a smaller version of adult medicine. She will close with a broader outlook on how building AI this way can extend its benefits to patient populations that current models too often overlook.

Ece Özkan Elsen

Professor Ece Özkan Elsen is the BRCCH Professor in Paediatric Digital Health Data Analysis and is based at the Department of Biomedical Engineering at the University of Basel. She develops machine learning methods that are easy to interpret, fair, and generalizable for paediatric care. In 2018, she obtained her PhD in Electrical Engineering from ETH Zurich, where she continued her research activities as postdoctoral fellow before moving to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the USA. In addition to her academic experience, Prof Özkan Elsen has also worked as a data and analytics consultant for companies in the private sector.

Schedule

• Welcome by Prof Daniel Müller, Co-Director of the BRCCH
• Lecture delivered by Prof Ece Özkan Elsen, University of Basel: "Children Are Not Small Adults: Bringing AI to Child Health"
• Q&A and Closing
• Networking Apéro

Registration

• Zoom registration
• In-person registration