Helen Le Sueur

Helen Le Sueur

Job title: Computer Scientist

Specialism: Clinical Scientific Computing

Qualifications: Psychology BSc; Biomedical Engineering MSc; Scientist Training Programme (Bioinformatics, Physical Sciences)

Helen has worked as a computer scientist at Royal Surrey since September 2022, designing and building bespoke computer programs that free up NHS staff time so teams can spend more time caring for patients.

She’s part of a team of around 25 computer scientists who, between them, can be working on around 100 projects at any given time. Helen said:

“A lot of the work we do as a team is streamlining and automating time-consuming processes. For example, replacing an Excel spreadsheet with something that's easier and quicker to use. This brings down the amount of time that some of our clinical and healthcare science teams need to spend inputting data.

“Research is also a big part of the work we do. I’ve been working on a project to detect a type of small tumour called a vestibular schwannoma in MRI scans. This project began when a clinician told us that around one per cent of the scans that they see have this type of tumour, and analysing scans for it was a huge burden on radiologists’ time. I wrote a program that automates the detection and flags up those that our radiologists might want to take a second look at. In the future, I’ll be trying to add this as a piece of software on a scanner, or on a computer attached to a scanner, so that it’s a routine part of the scan.

“I absolutely love my job and the team I work in. When I first started thinking about careers, the NHS was where I wanted to be. But I found myself enjoying engineering and computer programming so I lost the NHS side of things. Then I found out about the NHS Scientist Training Programme and that there was a software development specialism that can impact on patient care and make a real difference in the NHS. And that was my lightbulb moment.”