I am currently an Associate Professor (with tenure) in the Department of Biomedical Engineering and serve as Co-Director of the Center for AI Enabling Discovery in Disease Biology (AID2B) at Case Western Reserve University. I am also a Research Scientist & Biomedical Engineer at the Cleveland VA Medical Center. The primary focus of my research has been developing new artificial intelligence (AI) approaches including image analytics, radiomics, and machine learning schemes; applied to problems in computer-aided diagnosis & detection, disease characterization, as well as quantitative evaluation of response to treatment; in gastrointestinal cancers and digestive diseases. The key innovation here lies in designing unique AI tools that can capture biologically relevant and clinically intuitive measurements from routinely acquired imaging (MRI, CT, PET) or digitized images of tissue specimens. Critically, to “unlock” embedded information captured by these modalities, our AI tools inform and enrich imaging measurements with spatially resolved molecular, serum, or pathologic information. This in turn enables cross-scale association between imaging, pathology, and -omics data modalities towards building more accurate and generalizable computational imaging predictors that offer improved risk stratification, disease modeling, and biological quantitation in vivo. 

I have authored over 55 peer-reviewed journal publications, over 120 conference papers & abstracts, 1 book chapter, as well as delivered over 80 invited talks and panel discussions both in the US and abroad. I have 10 issued patents in the areas of medical image analysis, computer-aided diagnosis, and pattern recognition. I am an Associate Editor for 4 leading scientific journals, serve on Program Committees for 3 major medical image analytics conferences, and have been elected to Senior Member in the National Academy of Inventors, the IEEE, and the SPIE. I have previously been honored with the Fulbright Specialist Award and the SIIM Imaging Informatics Innovator Award. My lab’s research in colorectal cancers and digestive diseases has been funded through the DOD/CDMRP, the NIH (NCI, NIDDK, NINR, NHLBI), the VA, and the State of Ohio.