DrMathew Vithayathil

Dr Mathew Vithayathil is a specialist registrar in Gastroenterology and Hepatology and Academic Clinical Fellow at Imperial College London.

Dr Vithayathil undertook his pre-clinical training at the University of Cambridge, graduating with a First-Class Honours in Physiology, Development and Neuroscience. He obtained his MBBS from the University College of London with a Merit award. After qualification, Dr Vithayathil has been awarded integrated academic and clinical training posts, including an Academic Foundation Programme post at King's College London and a National Institute for Health and Care Research funded Academic Clinical Fellowship at Imperial College London. He was awarded the Cancer Research UK Clinical Research Fellowship and is currently undertaking a Doctoral degree at Imperial College London.

Dr Vithayathil's research interest is the use of novel technologies and artificial intelligence in the clinical care of gastrointestinal cancers. His current research has focused on the use of artificial intelligence for personalised treatment strategies in hepatocellular carcinoma. He is applying deep learning and machine learning to CT and MRI imaging to guide treatment selection in patients with liver cancer. This has included developing and validating a computer vision pipeline to predict survival and response in patients receiving immunotherapy. For this work he has been awarded the Best Young Investigator Poster award from the European Association for the Study of Liver Diseases. This work has also been accepted for publication in the Journal of Hepatology, the leading peer-reviewed journal in the field of liver disease worldwide. He is also developing deep and machine learning strategies to integrate data from different domains (including clinical, radiomic, immunological, metabonomic, transcriptomic and circulating-tumour DNA) to improve prediction of treatment success.

At Havard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, he used a natural language processing pipeline to develop a large longitudinal colonoscopy cohort to predict colorectal cancer risk after polypectomy. With the University of Cambridge, he helped develop a novel biomarker panel using real-time endoscopic confocal microscopy for early oesophageal cancer detection in patients with Barrett's Oesophagus, and won an international prize for this work from the United European Gastroenterologists. Dr Vithayathil is proficient in deep learning, machine learning, image analysis and statistics; using Python, Pytorch, MATLAB and high-performance computing platforms.

Dr Vithayathil has presented at multiple international conferences, including the European Association for the Study of Liver Diseases, United European Gastroenterologists Week, Digestive Diseases Week, British Society of Gastroenterology and the International Liver Cancer Association. Dr Vithayathil has won multiple awards for his work, at local, national and international levels. Internationally, he was awarded the Best Young Investigator Poster award at the European Association for the Study of Liver Diseases for this work using artificial intelligence-based image analysis to predict immunotherapy response and survival in HCC. He was awarded the Junior Investigator Award at the International Liver Cancer Association for his work using novel MRI imaging protocols for HCC surveillance. He won the Best Abstract Presentation Prize from the United European Gastroenterologists for the use of novel endoscopic confocal microscopy in oesophageal cancer surveillance. He was also awarded the Herbert Reiss Prize by the Royal Society of Medicine, and won two merit awards for his MBBS from the University College London. He graduated from University of Cambridge with a First Class Honours in Physiology, Development and Neuroscience, and was awarded the 1912 Senior Scholarship and Johnson-Jary Prize for his academic performance.

Dr Vithayathil has worked at leading academic institutions, including Imperial College London, University of Cambridge, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, University College London and King's College London. For his research he has published in multiple high-impact peer-reviewed journals including the Lancet, Journal of Hepatology, Nature Reviews Gastroenterology and Hepatology, Gut, Clinical Gastroenterology and Hepatology, eBioMedicine and PLoS Medicine. He has also co-authored a book chapter for Screening, Surveillance and Prevention of Hepatocellular Carcinoma for a Gastrointestinal Oncology textbook. He currently is a supervisor for the Imperial College London Cancer Frontiers intercalated BSc.