José Ramón Bobes combined his job at Inditex with pursuing a PhD at the Universidade da Coruña (UDC), where he developed research focused on applying artificial intelligence to pancreatic cancer. After working in consulting and at CERN, he settled in A Coruña and resumed his doctoral thesis at the LIDIA laboratory. For nearly five years, he balanced his professional career with academic research, recently and successfully defending his dissertation.
The project tackled one of the main challenges of pancreatic cancer: the scarcity of available data, as it is a disease with high mortality and limited clinical information to train AI systems. In collaboration with oncologists from Santiago de Compostela and under the supervision of David Alonso and Eduardo Mosqueira, Bobes worked to improve and expand the existing database. Starting from 185 real patient cases, he generated synthetic medical records that were evaluated by doctors to assess their realism, ultimately increasing the dataset to 292 patients and enhancing the performance of the AI models.
The research highlights the potential of collaboration between healthcare professionals and technology experts to develop more effective systems, although the tool created cannot yet be applied directly in clinical practice. According to Bobes, implementation would require more data, patients, doctors, and hospitals. Despite the personal challenge of balancing work and research, he values having contributed a small but meaningful step forward, drawing on the organizational skills he developed in the private sector.