Jeremy Fairbank was trained as a spinal orthopaedic surgeon at Cambridge University, Saint Thomas’ Hospital, London and Oswestry.
He is Emeritus Professor of Spine Surgery at Oxford University. He has been working on automated annotation of spinal imaging (DEXA, X-rays, MRI and CT scans) for over 10 years. Now he is applying these techniques to extracting information from large datasets in the UK, such as ALSPAC (a birth cohort recruited in 1991/2 whose participants are now over 35 years of age. They had DEXA scans from age 9-24, so we can plot the evolution of scoliosis. 5.9% of ~10000 participants have scoliosis). Other large datasets are UKBiobank (0.5million participants) and TwinsUK (~8k participants with DEXA scans).
All these datasets have genomic information. We are combining information from these resources to develop new ways of screening and diagnosing scoliosis as young as possible, before it has a chance to progress. JF has been President of the British Scoliosis Society and ISSLS, the International Society for the Study of the Lumbar Spine. He was visiting research advisor to Institut Calot at Berck Plage for several years during the 1990’s.