Introducing Qaiser Malik, Living Room Health’s Clinical Director of Radiology. Qaiser is a highly experienced musculoskeletal radiologist, responsible for radiology services at Mid and South Essex NHS Trusts, as well as teaching internationally.
Can you tell us a little bit about yourself?
My name is Qaiser Malik, I’m a consultant radiologist, and I’m the clinical director of Radiology at Living Room Health, as well as my NHS post where I am responsible for the radiology services at Mid and South Essex Trusts. I’m a musculoskeletal radiologist, so I report on musculoskeletal images and sports injuries, and I also do some cardiac CT scans.
As well as my role at Living Room Health, I also do a lot of work for the Royal College, so I do a lot of teaching both nationally and internationally. This year I’m speaking at UKIO in Liverpool, I’m speaking at the Royal College Conference in October, and I’ve just come back from presenting abroad in Pakistan as well.
"Radiology is the one speciality where you have to have a breadth of knowledge across multiple specialities, and that really interested me. "
What inspired your interest in radiology?
I think what inspired my interest was the role that diagnostic imaging played in the patient journey because every patient who comes into hospital will need a diagnostic test, usually an imaging test. I could see that a lot of doctors became super sub-specialised in areas. So, for example, a cardiologist would deal with just cardiology, an orthopaedic surgeon, even within orthopaedics, would deal with one body part, like upper limb or lower limb, or another particular area.
Radiology is the one speciality where you have to have a breadth of knowledge across multiple specialities, and that really interested me. I can speak to a cardiologist about a cardiac CT, and then I can speak to a shoulder surgeon about a shoulder MRI, so I thought radiology would be very interesting as a career.
What excites you about working with Living Room Health?
"We know that as radiologists, we have so much data to inspect, some scans being thousands of images. So what I'm working on is how we can use AI to help us interpret those images, to make us not just more efficient, but also safer and more accurate. "
What's something interesting you're working on right now?
AI, at the moment, is super cool. Obviously, everyone’s talking about AI, particularly with regard to ChatGPT, although that doesn’t impact radiology. But we’ve been working on artificial intelligence and I’ve been involved in it for about four or five years now, and what we’re looking at is how we can use the computing power that artificial intelligence has and utilise it to make us more efficient. We know that as radiologists, we have so much data to inspect, some scans being thousands of images. So what I’m working on is how we can use AI to help us interpret those images, to make us not just more efficient (so we can do more in a shorter space of time), but also safer and more accurate.
I’m working with a company at the moment, and we’re looking at a chest X-ray algorithm which will tell us when a chest X-ray is normal. What that will do is determine which ones are deemed abnormal, and then the radiologist can work through those first rather than chronologically. In the future, it would be great to get some of the really high-volume work to be auto-reported, but we are still very far away from that.
What did you want to be when you were younger?
I actually didn’t want to be a doctor until I was doing my A-levels. Some people have a fantastic story of what inspired them to be a doctor, but I don’t. I just was interested in science, and I was encouraged by my teachers and people around me to consider medicine as a career.
I’ve always been really interested in business and enterprise, and I think I wanted to do something entrepreneurial, and I think I’ve always done that throughout my career as well. In my teenage years, I was very interested in how business and big businesses work and how people build something from nothing. So I was fascinated by, for example, how Coca-Cola became so big and why everyone wore Nike trainers, and brand awareness and corporate identity. And that’s why I think Living Room Health and working with Living Room Health was an exciting opportunity because it gelled together my interest in enterprise, business, startups, and building something with my day job of being a radiologist.
