About me

Please see my LinkedIn profile for recent updates.

(Following was last updated in 2017)

I have a Computer Science/Health Informatics background and currently working as a Senior Scientist for Philips Healthcare exploring ways to improve radiology reading and operational workflow efficiency. Following is an overview of my background:

• Health informatics professional and subject matter expert in radiology workflow
• Background in computer science, with over 7 years post-PhD experience in healthcare industry
• Proven track record of leading, coordinating and collaborating at the front end of product innovation with a focus on relationship building with hospital administrators
• Part of Advanced Concept Development team that identifies, develops and prototypes innovative solutions that can be productized within 2-3 years
• Product owner for 3 projects in the process of being productized
• Strong emphasis on developing data-driven solutions to improve clinical and operational aspects of radiology
• Strong focus on understanding customer requirements, feature prioritization and phased implementation
• R&D expertise in data analysis and interpretation, medical text processing, hospital charges and payments, ontologies, rapid prototyping, PHI de-identification and HL7/DICOM
• Providing guidance to Philips Research on various applications of deep learning techniques and exploring productizing opportunities
• Power user of PowerBI, Tableau, R, C#/WPF, SQL Server and Excel
• Over 50 peer-reviewed publications and 20 patent applications (6 granted). See Google Scholar for the full list of publications and Google Patents for the full list of patents –
Publications: http://scholar.google.com/citations?user=dgZ-ypwAAAAJ
Patents: https://patents.google.com/?inventor=Thusitha+Dananjaya+De+Silva+MABOTUWANA

Prior to my current role, I interned a couple of times at Microsoft where I explored the use of touch based devices, including Windows Phone 7, to facilitate data entry into Amalga (the MS owned unified health enterprise platform). I developed several functional prototypes using C#/WPF/SilverLight/WebServices/SQL Server type technologies to demonstrate the concepts, one of which was demonstrated at HIMSS 2011. Take a look at my LinkedIn profile for a more detailed list of things I’ve done in the past.

I did my undergrad in Computer Systems Engineering at the University of Auckland and graduated in 2004 with First Class Honours. Then I spent some time working in industry as a Java software engineer before starting my PhD in Computer Science with a focus on health informatics, at the University of Auckland under the supervision of Prof. Jim Warren. I had quite a productive run as a PhD student, and managed to submit pretty much in three years, on the 12th of May 2010 to be precise. My PhD research focused on using primary care electronic medical record data to identify patients with chronic conditions who are on suboptimal therapy – have a look here for an overview. If you are interested, a copy of my PhD thesis can be downloaded from here. There’s a short profile of me on the Auckland CS website as well now 🙂