Current News

November 2024

• Robert Tweedy, Sr. Manager of Information Technology in BMI, was selected as a recipient of the 2024 SOM Service Champion Award.  This recognition is a testament to the hard work, dedication, and excellence he consistently brings to BMI’s and SOM’s mission.
• The CTSA Informatics Research Team Michael Proctor (Nita Deshpande, Chad Robichaux, Venky Javvaji, Dileep Gunda, Sreekar Anugu, Matt Pagel, Barney Chan, Megan Schwinne, Ryan Birmingham, and Julia Schneider) have been selected as the recipients of the 2024 SOM Team Excellence Award. 

Both will be honored at the SOM awards luncheon on the 10th of December. Many Congrats!!

November 2024

Drs. Selen Bozkurt and Abeed Sarker have been awarded an R21 grant from the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) under PAR-23-239 for their project titled: "Integrating Loneliness and Social Isolation Insights into Late-Life Suicide Risk Prediction Through the Digital Phenotyping of Electronic Health Records."

October 2024

Dr. Abeed Sarker was recognized for being inducted as a Fellow of the American Medical Informatics Association (FAMIA). 

October 2024

Dr. Gari Clifford received a new NIH grant (R56AG083845) from the National Institute of Aging entitled ‘Multimodal Deep Learning to Assess Cognitive Processes and a Validation of a Visuospatial Memory EyeTracking Test in Diverse Population’. This work, in collaboration with Dr. Allan Levey - the Director of the Goizueta Institute at Emory Brain Health, focuses on expanding our VisMET system for tracking cognitive impairment to a larger and more diverse population, to explore VisMET’s ability to detect preclinical memory decline as well as longitudinal change in a preclinical sample, and to develop novel analytical methods and metrics that will associate performance on the same brief task with executive function, processing speed, and emotion, thereby supporting broader clinical utility. 

October 2024

Dr. Reza Sameni was honored with the School of Medicine Hidden Gem Award at the 2024 Celebration of Faculty Eminence event on October 29. Dr. Sameni was nominated for his exemplary teaching, service, and research in BMI. He was recognized as a kind, capable, and dedicated researcher, teacher, and mentor who contributes to all facets of the department—from training BMI students, postdocs, and staff to collaborating with faculty and other researchers within and beyond our department, and serving in various key administrative roles, including as the Scientific Director of the Medical Informatics and AI Core in the School of Medicine.

September 2024

Congratulations to all BMI members on your achievements! Funding secured includes:

• Dr. Hyeokhyen Kwon for the National Center of Neuromodulation for Rehabilitation (NC NM4R) 2024-2025 Pilot Project Grants as a Co-Investigator
• Dr. Selen Bozkurt for a second US Department of Veterans Affairs IPA
• Dr. Abeed Sarker for a diversity supplement on his NIH R01 award, Mining Social Media Big Data for Toxicovigilance: Studying Substance Use via Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning Methods
• Dr. Reza Sameni for Dr. Wendy Book’s (Cardiology) new CDC award as a co-investigator, Surveillance of Congenital Heart Defects Among Children, Adolescents, and Adults 
• Dr. Lucas McKay for Dr. Lena Ting’s (BME) R01 renewal as a co-investigator, Neuromechanical modeling of postural responses: mechanisms of balance impairments in Parkinson's Disease 
• Dr. Tony Pan for a Radiology seed grant, Toward the Precise Quantification of MR Image Quality, 1-year extension on the ORISE (Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education), and a 10-month extension on the UFL NIH OT2 project, Researching COVID to Enhance Recovery (RECOVER) Initiative
• Dr. Gari Clifford for a NIH R56 for Multimodal Deep Learning to Assess Cognitive Processes and a Validation of a Visuospatial Memory Eye-Tracking Test in Diverse Populations
• The Georgia Clinical and Translational Science Alliance (GaCTSA) for a funding for an 8th year 

September 2024

Dr. Reyna and Dr. Clifford wrapped up the George B. Moody PhysioNet Challenge 2024 in Karlsruhe, Germany at the start of September. This award-winning internationally-known competition has been running for 25 years, funded continuously by the NIH, and recently renewed for another 5 years. It is internationally known in the field of AI in cardiology for pushing the boundaries of the field and generating a novel benchmark dataset, year after year. This year there were two extra prizes (announced at an earlier Hackathon at Data Science Africa in June), sponsored by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers’ Signal Processing Society (IEEE SPS), for African teams. The winners came from Dekut University in Kenya.

September 2024

Dr. Abeed Sarker is Teaching Faculty on (SON) Dr. Sangmi Kim’s R25 award, Trauma-informed Data Science to Prevent Intimate Partner Violence among Pregnant and Postpartum Women. Dr. Sarker will be in charge of the module “Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning,” under which he will develop and teach three online sessions as pre-work and seven in-person, hands-on sessions during the summer intensive over two days. He will provide the CDC’s National Violent Death Reporting System (NVDRS) data he already obtained to develop tailored course materials at the course planning phase, which will save the time that needs to undergo the CDC’s review, approval, and release of the requested data.

September 2024

Congratulations to Dr. Nasim Katebi for being recognized as the 2024 Emory School of Medicine Researcher. 

Nasim Katebi was recognized by her peers as a Researcher who exemplified the outstanding faculty of the Emory School of Medicine. Dr. Katebi was selected to be featured on the 2024 Emory School of Medicine Researcher Appreciation Day, an honor reserved for a select group of faculty for their groundbreaking, and continued pursuit of novel and innovative ideas. View the full list at Emory 2024 Researcher Appreciation Day. 

July 2024

Congratulations to all BMI members on your achievements! Funding secured includes:

• Dr. Selen Bozkurt through the Emory Palliative Care Center,
• Dr. Lucas McKay for the McCamish Parkinson's Disease Innovation Program Blue Sky Research Grant and VA Intergovernmental Personnel Act (IPA), 
• Dr. Yashar Kiarashi, a postdoctoral researcher in Dr. Clifford's lab, for the Thrasher Research Fund Early Career Award Program, Enhancing Behavioral Understandings and Interventions in Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder using Artificial Intelligence,
• Dr. Drew Walker, a postdoctoral fellow with Drs. Abeed Sarker and Selen Bozkurt, for CDC IPA, 
• Dr. Tony Pan for extension on the Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education (ORISE),
• Drs. Reza Sameni and Gari Clifford for Dr. Wendy Book's new NHI R21 award, Machine Learning Based Analysis of Longitudinal Changes in the Congenital Heart Disease Electrocardiogram, and
• Dr. Abeed Sarker for being a faculty mentor/instructor for an R25 funded to the School of Nursing, Trauma-informed data science to prevent intimate partner violence among pregnant and postpartum women.

June 2024

Congratulations to Dr. Selen Bozkurt for securing funding through an Intergovernmental Personnel Act (IPA) assignment with the VA Palo Alto Health Care System for FY 2024. This funding supports her role as a statistical and natural language processing expert consultant, focusing on reducing social isolation among older veterans.

June 2024

Congratulations to Dr. Matthew Reyna for the recent acknowledgement by the School of Medicine for his service and commitment to Education. 

Dr. Matthew Reyna is the Vice Chair for Education in BMI and serves as the Co-DGS for the BMI-BIOS-CS joint PhD program. This involves countless hours of unnoticed grind to keep the program running, and includes managing faculty, students and administrators in order to schedule courses, plan lessons, submit marking, allocate TAs, engage in rotations, submit paperwork, organize committee reviews, and ensure all students are on track. He has also redesigned the PhD program to create a new and innovative offering for AI-Health. Moreover, Dr. Reyna takes the time to provide engaged and active mentorship to every single student in the CSI program and postdoctoral fellows throughout their studies.

June 2024

Dr. Reyna and Dr. Clifford, who lead the George B. Moody PhysioNet Challenges, recently traveled to Nyeri, Kenya to run a workshop at Data Science Africa (DSA), running from 6-7 June. With generous support from the IEEE Signal Processing Society’s Challenges and Data Collections Committee (CDCC), an extra set of cash prizes have been provided for participating teams from Africa. a workshop at this year’s annual DSA meeting in Kenya. The aim of the workshop is to enhance African representation and innovation in the global landscape of AI in Health, and to add to the efforts to decolonize the health technology landscape, which is dominated by data, researchers and industry from the global North.   

Particular thanks are due to James Weigle, Zuzana Koscova, Deepanshi, Dr. Reza Sameni, and the rest of the Challenge team for their tireless effort and support of the Challenge this year, especially during the workshop for just-in-time support!

May 2024

Dr. Sepideh Nikookar, a postdoctoral fellow in Dr. Clifford’s group, has been awarded the prestigious Joseph Leung Award for Best Computer Science Ph.D. Thesis in her department at the New Jersey Institute of Technology. Sepideh successfully defended her doctoral dissertation, entitled “Human-AI Complex Task Planning,” in the summer of 2023. As part of her Ph.D. research, Sepideh designed computational frameworks for complex task planning that are generalizable and scalable across large applications by adapting reinforcement learning-based computational paradigms. During her Ph.D., she published widely in flagship data management venues as the first author, while diligently working on two high-demand projects funded by the Office of Naval Research. Her designed algorithms are currently deployed and being used at the Naval Surface Warfare Center (NSWC), Corona, for estimating maintenance delays of U.S. naval ships.

May 2024

Dr. Gari Clifford received an additional donation from the Center for Discovery (CFD) in New York to continue his group’s work with the CFD, a non - profit whose mission is “to build a compassionate and connected community with cutting-edge care and education for the most medically and behaviorally complex individuals.” The funds will support work on predicting next-day adverse behaviors in residents of the CFD, in order to design interventions or therapies to reduce these events and improve outcomes.

May 1, 2024

BMI is pleased to announce the appointment of Dr. Saima Rathore as a new assistant professor, effective on May 1st, 2024, with a secondary appointment in the Department of Neurology. 

Dr. Rathore transitioned to the department from a Senior Advisor role at Eli Lilly and Company, where she developed novel methods for patient enrollment, drug response assessment, and enrichment in clinical trials of neurodegenerative diseases. She holds a master’s in computer engineering and a Ph.D. in computer and information sciences from Pakistan. In her new role, she will direct independent research in harnessing AI methods to enhance healthcare.

Dr. Rathore research focuses mainly on neuroimaging of neurodegenerative diseases and aims to apply advanced imaging technology for discovery of multi-modal biomarkers to facilitate earlier detection and predict progression of neurodegenerative pathologies. She aims to develop and validate multi-modal biomarkers of neurodegeneration to help revolutionize early diagnosis, facilitate the initiation of prevention strategies for at-risk individuals, monitor therapy efficacy, evaluate regional specificity, and enhance enrichment in clinical trials. Additionally, her lab centers around leveraging computational medicine tools, imaging, and machine learning to develop diagnostic and prognostic indices for oncologic conditions, thus laying the groundwork for personalized treatment and care.

April 2024

Congratulations to Dr. J. Lucas McKay on receiving a grant from Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson's Research. The grant, entitled “An international multimodal protocol for assessing freezing of gait in individuals living with Parkinson’s disease.” This two-year international project will evaluate a new behavioral scale for freezing of gait (FOG), a symptom many people with Parkinson’s disease experience where they feel like their feet are glued to the floor. The scale is designed to be used with wearable sensors and video recordings, which will enable groundbreaking machine learning studies. The Emory site will enroll ≈25 people with Parkinson’s disease; the entire dataset will comprise >250 patients. Other sites are in the USA, Canada, Belgium, the Netherlands, Israel, and Australia.

April 2024

Zikang Leng, a 3rd year GT CS student supervised by Dr. Hyeokhyen Kwon, received the 2024 National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Research Fellowship, one of the highest honors for a newly starting Ph.D. student in Fall 2024. He will start his Ph.D. at the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Tech in Fall 2024.

Zikang Leng also received the Provost’s Academic Excellence Award. This award is for a student representing the most outstanding scholastic record from their college.

April 22, 2024

Dr. Yun Wang's lab has been awarded two NIH grants. The first, a R00 award from the NICHD, will leverage artificial intelligence to tackle the technical challenges in infant brain segmentation. This project aims to outline the growth trajectories of brain structures and functions, correlate these with neuropsychological functions, and predict developmental outcomes. The second grant, an R01 from the NIMH, will explore how pre-pregnancy maternal obesity might affect children's emotion regulation and increase psychopathology risks through its impact on the maternal gut microbiome and metabolome.

Additionally, Dr. Wang's lab celebrated a major accomplishment with their paper, “MAPSeg: Unified Unsupervised Domain Adaptation for Heterogeneous Medical Image Segmentation Based on 3D Masked Autoencoding and Pseudo-Labeling,” being accepted at the Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) 2024. This pioneering work introduces a versatile framework for medical image segmentation, which will primarily be applied to developing infant brains. Dr. Wang will present this research in Seattle in June 2024.

Furthermore, Dr. Wang has been invited to give an oral presentation on one of her significant works, “Charting the Influence of Maternal Depression Throughout Pregnancy on Neonatal Thalamocortical White Matter Connectivity,” at the Society of Biological Psychiatry Conference (SOBP) in May 2024 in Austin, Texas.

April 12, 2024

Congratulations to Scarlett Duan (Emory CS MS), Arya Mohan (GT CS MS), Lauhitya Reddy (Emory-GT BME MS), Shoibolina Kaushik (Emory CS MS), and Ketan Anand (GT ECE MS) from Hyeokhyen Kown's Lab on receiving the best poster awards at the Bio-STAR AI symposium hosted by Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Emory University and Georgia Institute of Technology.

Dr. Kwon’s lab presented their latest research in developing accessible, affordable, and scalable computer vision and wearable-based AI systems for quantifying brain health, including mild cognitive impairment (Scarlett Duan; Winner), Parkinson’s disease and stroke (Arya Mohan and Lauhitya Reddy; Winner), gait pathology (Shoibolina Kaushik and Ketan Anand; Winner), and autism spectrum disorder (Barun Das).

Stay tuned for publications on these exciting projects! If you're interested in contributing to the development of accessible, affordable, and scalable health AI systems, please contact Dr. Kwon.

April 1, 2024

Congratulations to Megan Schwinne, MPH, on the publication of her research article titled “Sensitivity of the African neuropsychology battery memory subtests and learning slopes in discriminating APOE 4 and amyloid pathology in adult individuals in the Democratic Republic of Congo” in Frontiers.

Utilizing a cohort of approximately 100 individuals from the Democratic Republic of Congo, Dr. Jean Ikanga (Principal Investigator), Megan Schwinne, and colleagues conducted an analysis of plasma biomarkers and dementia screening tests pertinent to Alzheimer’s Disease (AD). Their aim was not only to elucidate the relationship between plasma biomarkers and AD but also to contribute to the literature concerning this under-researched population. This particular publication focused on assessing the sensitivity of subtests derived from the African Neuropsychology Battery (ANB) and their associated learning slope metrics in detecting amyloid pathology and APOE e4 status within the cohort. Sensitivity rates for the learning metrics ranged from 54.3% to 89.7%, with certain tests exhibiting superior performance compared to others. Nevertheless, the area under the curve (AUC) values ranged from 0.60 to 0.69. The study highlighted that some ANB memory tests and learning slope metrics could effectively differentiate individuals with normal cognitive function from those with amyloid pathology or discern those with or without APOE e4, mirroring findings observed in Western populations.

March 28, 2024

Congratulations to Drs. Kwon and McKay for being invited to speak at the Oracle Life Sciences Connect in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania on Thursday, March 28th. They were invited to discuss their recent work on applications of deep learning to quantify Freezing of Gait and other signs in Parkinson’s disease. This work was originally supported in part by Oracle and is now published in Sensors.

March 2024

Congratulations to Dr. Azra Ismail on receiving the Outstanding Dissertation Award from Association for Computing Machinery (AMC) Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction (SIGCHI). 

Dr. Azra Ismail’s dissertation examines and designs AI systems in and for resource-constrained health settings, specifically focusing on maternal and childcare delivery in India. It represents an exemplary showcase for using a feminist lens to study AI integration in a range of critical settings: with existing data flows and practices, in multi-stakeholder care ecologies, and in everyday care work. The committee acknowledged the importance of the topic, the clarity and reflexivity of the analysis, and the social impact of its contributions. They commended the thesis as laudable, pioneering work.

Dr. Ismail will be formally recognized as an award recipient at the upcoming ACM CHI 2024 conference in Hawaii in May 2024. 

February 9, 2024

Zuzana Koščová, a Software Engineer in Dr. Clifford’s lab, has been selected as a finalist for the 2024 Jos Willems Early Career Investigator Competition (JWECIC) with her work entitled “Prediction of atrial fibrillation from overnight Polysomnograms”.  

Her work focuses on using machine learning and deep learning methods for the early prediction of atrial fibrillation from the ECG channel in polysomnographic recordings. Since atrial fibrillation is one of the most common cardiac arrhythmias and is associated with an increased risk of stroke and heart failure, early prediction of this pathology could help to implement appropriate stroke and heart failure prevention tools.

The competition will take place at the International Society of Computerized ECG conference in Braselton, GA on April 4-7, 2024.

February 7, 2024

Congratulations to Dr. J. Lucas McKay on his promotion to Associate Professor in BMI, with effect from September 1st, with simultaneous promotion in Biomedical Engineering (BME) and Neurology. Dr. McKay is an invaluable asset to all three departments, supporting clinical work, driving research, and also serving as BMI’s Vice Chair for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI).

Dr. McKay’s research combines motion analysis and posturography with shallow and deep machine learning techniques to understand the lived experience of Parkinson’s disease (PD) and other conditions. He is particularly interested in the underpinnings of freezing of gait (FOG) in Parkinson’s disease, and will co-host the 2025 Meeting of the International Consortium for Freezing of Gait here next Summer. Dr. McKay also plays an important clinical service support role in the Movement Disorders program within the Emory Brain Health Center. He architects and maintains the processing pipelines and databases for the full-body behavioral testing facility there, which currently holds the largest database of full-body kinematic data of movement disorders patients worldwide. In 2023 he implemented the processing for additional testing equipment that enabled the facility to increase overall common procedural terminology (CPT) code generation by 50%. He also contributes to numerous discovery studies and clinical trials in PD, MCI, stroke, and other conditions as a formal study biostatistician.

February 1, 2024

Shaoyan Pan, MS, a BMI PhD dysentery supervised by Dr. Xiaofeng Yang was awarded the Robert F. Wagner All-Conference Best Student Paper at SPIE Medical Imaging 2024 entitled “3D Volumetric CT image reconstruction with single X-ray projection using denoising diffusion probabilistic model.” This new work holds promise for real-time tumor tracking and post-treatment dose verification applications.

The official announcement of this award will take place during the SPIE Medical Imaging Awards and Plenary Session on February 18, 2024, in San Diego.

January 2024

BMI is pleased to announce the appointment of Dr. Yun Wang as a new assistant professor. 

Dr. Wang joined Biomedical Informatics in January and will direct the independent “NextGen Maternal-Infant Informatics Lab (NexMii),” a laboratory at the forefront of pioneering research at the intersection of technology and healthcare. NexMii is committed to three fundamental research objectives: (1) the application of artificial intelligence to enhance maternal health; (2) the use of AI to better analyze fetal and infant neuroimaging data, clarify the trajectory of neurodevelopment in the crucial first 1,000 days of life, thus fostering optimal early childhood outcomes; and (3) the integration of comprehensive biological data analysis to examine the impact of maternal health on infant brain development. 

Before joining Emory BMI, Dr. Wang served as an Assistant Professor at Duke Psychiatry and Electrical & Computer Engineering. Her research, now supported by grants from NICHD, NIMH, and the Brain and Behavior Foundation, positions her to lead NexMii in harnessing AI methods to improve maternal and infant well-being, from early detection of potential health issues to personalized care and beyond.