Conversation with Dr.Janak Gunatilleke

Amol M. Joshi, PhD, is the Thomas H. Davis Professor in Business at Wake Forest University (WFU). He holds a joint faculty appointment as an Associate Professor of Strategic Management in the WFU School of Business and as an Associate Professor of Innovation & Commercialization in the WFU School of Medicine.  Dr. Joshi is an inventor who helps others reinvent themselves. His passion is guiding aspiring entrepreneurs, executives, and students of all levels to pursue their business dreams. He has trained startup founders, corporate managers, and industry leaders in the US, Austria, Denmark, and Vietnam.   A recognized expert on innovation, his interdisciplinary research examines how inventors create and commercialize new technologies and launch and fund new ventures. With a 13-year prior career as an engineer and entrepreneur in venture capital-funded startups in Silicon Valley, Dr. Joshi co-invented two patents for AI-based voice assistant products. He co-founded BeVocal, a speech recognition software startup acquired by Nuance Communications, and served as VP of Sales & Marketing from 1999 to 2003.   Dr. Joshi has advised Federal agencies including NASA, NSF, NIH, and the US Department of Energy on national innovation policies and R&D grant programs for small businesses. Dr. Joshi earned a PhD in Business Administration from UNC Chapel Hill, an MBA and MS in Engineering Sciences from Dartmouth College, and a BS in Electrical Engineering from Georgia Tech with highest honors.

In this episode, we feature Dr. Kamal Maheshwari, MD, MPH, FASA.He is a distinguished anesthesiologist with extensive experience in clinical practice, research, and innovation. He completed his medical education and anesthesia training at the University of Delhi, India (1995-2004) before relocating to the United States in 2005 for advanced training in anesthesiology. From 2009 to 2023, Dr. Maheshwari worked at the Cleveland Clinic Foundation, where he established himself as a renowned clinician, researcher, and innovator. In 2015, he earned a Master of Public Health (MPH) from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, specializing in health policy and management. Additionally, he received a certificate in Quality Patient Safety and Outcomes Research from the same institution. In 2016, Dr. Maheshwari founded the Center of Perioperative Intelligence at the Cleveland Clinic Foundation, focusing on artificial intelligence applications in perioperative medicine. His research portfolio includes over 100 peer-reviewed papers, book chapters published in major academic journals, primarily evaluating the role of advanced technologies, predictive algorithms, machine learning, and artificial intelligence in developing decision support systems to enhance perioperative care and outcomes. Dr. Maheshwari has served as an advisor to several health technology firms, including Edwards Lifesciences and Philips Healthcare, contributing to the development of life-saving medical devices and solutions. Dr. Maheshwari is also the founding partner of BrainX and BrainX Community, both of which being AI in healthcare companies based out of US.Driven by a commitment to global health improvement, Dr. Maheshwari founded Roojh Health, an organization dedicated to enhancing healthcare in developing countries. The primary mission of Roojh Health is to empower doctors and patients with high-quality information for better decision-making.

Dr. Rashidi combines his passion for patient care, research and education with his unique training in bioinformatics and machine learning (ML) to create innovative new tools (i.e. MILO, STNG, Pitt-GPT, etc.) and resources (Hematology Outlines, Cleveland Clinic's AI course, etc.) that improve clinical practice, research and education. His experience in ML dates back to his graduate years at UCSD which subsequently allowed him to serve as the principal author and editor of several popular bioinformatics textbooks. This background has also enabled him to develop various novel AI-ML platforms. Before joining U Pitt / UPMC, he served as the founding director of Cleveland Clinic’s PLMI Center for AI and Data Science & Vice Chair of Technology Innovation & Computational Pathology, and before that he served as the Director of AI for University of California Davis Medical Center and Professor & Vice chair of informatics, leading a large number of AI studies with numerous collaborators from various prominent institutions. These experiences and studies have also led to numerous products (most recent of which bring the on-prem LLM framework Pitt-GPT) & several filed patents (e.g. the University of California IP MILO: Machine Intelligence Learning Optimizer, the proprietary Automated ML platform & it’s suite of 6 complimentary separate unique Data Science Apps & Cleveland Clinic’s new automated synthetic data generator and Validation platform STNG, Synthetic Tabular Neural Generator) along with a large number of manuscripts in which he serves as corresponding author. These products have been licensed to several industry and academic institutions & serving as a powerful suite of data science tools for a large number of clinical, quality and educational projects while also starting to help optimize and expedite data access needs for all investigators. In addition to the above, Dr. Rashidi is also a well known educator with numerous teaching awards who has created some of the AppStore’s most popular hematology Apps along with Cleveland Clinic’s most recent AI-ML course (launched Cleveland Clinic wide in Jan 2024). He is also the co-founder and senior editor of HematologyOutlines, a very popular digital hematology atlas that is used internationally and endorsed by the American Society of Clinical Pathology. Dr. Rashidi’s efforts in the AI-ML & digital space are internationally recognized, as evidenced by his continuous invited talks at prominent conferences & institutions, his various journal AI/ML editorial & reviewer roles, his multitude of key invited review articles & his continued national committee roles within this space.

Indira Negi is a consultant with Global Health Labs working on AI ultrasound focused on Obstetrics in India and next steps for pediatric lung ultrasound, alongside the Gates Foundation. Before this she was a Senior Advisor and Deputy Director at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and lead efforts to improve maternal and newborn health by investing in innovative devices and software that can help with early diagnosis and reduce risk during pregnancy and labor. She worked at Intel for over a decade, leading the sensors engineering team for wearable devices, serving in engineering and business roles across several groups, and eventually leading strategy and planning for the Health and Life Science business unit. She also advised Intel’s corporate venture arm on health technology investments. Before joining the foundation, Indira was the vice president of product management at AliveCor, an ECG medical devices company focused on cardiology services. She holds five patents. Indira gets her sense of purpose from creating new technology and making existing technology more accessible to reduce suffering. She gets her joy from spending time in nature, being with her dogs, family, and friends, and building things. Indira trained as an electrical engineer. Links https://www.linkedin.com/in/indiranegi/ indiranegi.com

Welcome to BrainX AI in Medicine Podcast series, where we bring in leaders within fields of AI and Medicine to discuss their cutting-edge research, explore boundaries of current knowledge, and provide insightful commentary on how to effectively lead the AI revolution in Medicine. Today's guest is Vivek Natarajan, who is a Research Scientist at Google leading research at the intersection of large language models (LLMs) and biomedicine. In particular, Vivek is the lead researcher behind Med-PaLM and Med-PaLM 2, which were the first AI systems to obtain passing and expert level scores on US Medical License exam questions respectively. Med-PaLM was recently published in Nature and has been featured in The Scientific American, Wall Street Journal, The Economist, among many others. More recently, Vivek also led the development of Med-PaLM M, the first demonstration of a generalist biomedical AI system and AMIE, a research AI system, which surpassed Primary Care Physicians on multiple axes pertaining to diagnostic dialogue in an randomized study conducted in the style of a virtual Objective Structured Clinical Examination (OSCE). Over the years, Vivek’s research has been published in well-regarded journals and conferences like Nature, Nature Medicine, Nature Biomedical Engineering, JMLR, CVPR, and NeurIPS. It also forms the basis for several regulated medical device products under clinical trials at Google, including the NHS AI award winning breast cancer detection system Mammo Reader and the skin condition classification system DermAssist.

Michael A. Pfeffer, MD, FACP serves as Chief Information Officer and Associate Dean for Stanford Health Care and Stanford University School of Medicine. Michael oversees Technology and Digital Solutions (TDS), responsible for providing world class technology solutions to Stanford Health Care and School of Medicine, enabling new opportunities for groundbreaking research, teaching, and compassionate care across two hospitals and over 150 clinics. TDS supports Stanford Medicine’s mission to improve human health through discovery and care and strategic priorities to be value focused, digitally driven, and uniquely Stanford.Michael is a Clinical Professor in the Department of Medicine and Division of Hospital Medicine with a joint appointment in the center for Biomedical Research (BMIR) in Stanford University School of Medicine. As such, Michael continues to provide clinical care as a Hospitalist Physician as well as teaching medical students and residents on the medicine inpatient wards.Prior to joining Stanford Medicine, Michael served as the Assistant Vice Chancellor and Chief Information Officer for UCLA Health Sciences. During his tenure, Michael served as the lead physician for the largest electronic health record “big bang” go-live of its time, encompassing over 26,000 users. Michael subsequently became the first Chief Medical Informatics Officer for UCLA Health before transitioning into the Chief Information Officer position. Under his leadership, UCLA Health IT achieved numerous industry awards including the HIMSS Analytics Stage 7 Inpatient, Ambulatory, and Analytics Certifications; the Most Wired designation for eight consecutive years; US News & World Report’s Most Connected Hospitals; the Top Master’s in Healthcare Administration 30 Most Technologically Advanced Hospitals in the World; and the prestigious HIMSS Davies Award. Michael also implemented of one of the first ACGME-accredited Clinical Informatics Fellowship Programs and served as its Associate Program Director.Michael has lectured worldwide on health information technology; served on the national HIMSS Physician Committee and as a HIMSS Stage 7 international site surveyor; and has published numerous peer-reviewed articles on health IT. Michael was featured in Becker’s Hospital Review as 10 physician CIOs to know and 12 standout healthcare CIOs and was one of LA’s top doctors in Los Angeles Magazine.

Dr.Castro has over 20 years of experience as a physician, entrepreneur, former Ceo of a medical health care system and author, and he is passionate about leveraging AI to transform healthcare delivery and outcomes as a Strategic advisor of ChatGPT & Healthcare. And yes we will be talking about his new book “ ChatGPT and Healthcare: The Key To New Future of Medicine” He works with healthcare professionals and AI developers to create and implement AI adoption plans, identify innovative AI applications, and drive the integration of AI solutions.   His aim is to bridge the gap between AI technology, healthcare services, and strategic decision-making. His focus is on ensuring the alignment of AI with clinical needs, data integrity, technological compatibility, and staff training. He also shares his insights and vision through his books, publications, and public speaking engagements to increase awareness and inspire action on AI's transformative potential.    

Yanshan Wang, PhD, FAMIA is vice chair of Research and assistant professor within the Department of Health Information Management. His research interests focus on artificial intelligence (AI), natural language processing (NLP) and machine/deep learning methodologies and applications in health care. His research goal is to leverage different dimensions of data and data-driven computational approaches to meet the needs of clinicians, researchers, patients and customers. Prior to joining Pitt, Wang was assistant professor in the Department of AI & Informatics at Mayo Clinic. Wang has led several NIH-funded projects, which aimed to develop NLP and AI algorithms to automatically extract information from free-text electronic health records (EHRs), such as clinical notes, radiology reports, and pathology reports. He proposed several novel NLP methodologies to improve information retrieval (IR) and information extraction (IE) from clinical notes and applied those novel NLP approaches in multiple disease areas, including depression, pediatric asthma, Alzheimer’s disease, non-alcoholic fatty liver disease and fractures. He has served as Principal Investigator (PI) on multiple awards, including an Amazon AWS Diagnostic Development Initiative (DDI) Award. He has over 60 peer-reviewed publications. Wang has been actively serving the informatics and NLP communities. He has served as a Student Paper Competition Committee for the AMIA Annual Symposium and was an associate editor for MedInfo conference. He is also a regular reviewer for a dozen of prestigious journals, such as Nature Communications, Bioinformatics, Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association (JAMIA), Journal of Biomedical Informatics (JBI) and IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering (TKDE), and PC members for multiple leading international conferences in health informatics, such as AMIA, ACM-BCB, IEEE-ICHI, and IEEE-BIBM. Wang also organized several shared tasks, including the first BioCreative/OHNLP challenge in 2018 and the second n2c2/OHNLP challenge in 2019, to encourage the informatics and NLP communities to tackle NLP problems in the clinical domain. He is also a steering committee member for the HealthNLP workshop. In 2020, he was inducted into the Fellows of AMIA (FAMIA).

Dr.Azra Bihorac is senior associate dean for research at the University of Florida College of Medicine and is the R. Glenn Davis Professor of Medicine, Surgery, Anesthesiology, and Physiology & Functional Genomics; the Lab Director of the Precision and Intelligent Systems in Medicine Research Partnership (PRISMAP); and Co-Director of the Intelligent Critical Care Center (IC3), a multi-disciplinary center focused on providing sustainable support and leadership for transformative medical AI research, education, and clinical applications to advance patients’ health in critical and acute care medicine.    The journey of Dr. Bihorac’s medical career has spanned multiple continents, from her time as a medical student at the University of Sarajevo in Bosnia & Herzegovina to her role as a dean at the University of Florida in the United States. Through her research, she is addressing an unprecedented opportunity for world-leading ambient, immersive, and AI innovation to transform the diagnosis, monitoring, and treatment for critically and acutely ill patients. Dr. Bihorac’s vision is to develop tools for intelligent human-centered health care that is tailored to a patient’s “personal clinical profile” using digital data. She is a nationally and internationally recognized expert in medical AI, data science, informatics, and translational research, and earlier this year she was interviewed on NBC Nightly News and NPRabout the future of artificial intelligence in critical care.    Dr. Bihorac is currently a PI for multiple NIH-funded programs, including a $23.5 million, multicenter Bridge2AI project called “A Patient-Focused CHoRUS for Equitable AI,” which seeks to develop a 100,000-patient dataset for AI research in critical care along with AI workforce training events and a set of standards for the ethical use of AI in critical care.  

In this episode, we talk to Dr. Mohammad Ghassemi, Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at Michigan State University (MSU). He is an internationally renowned scientist and entrepreneur with extensive national and international consulting experience. He holds a Ph.D from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in electrical engineering and computer science with a focus on artificial intelligence. Dr. Ghassemi was formerly a director of data science at S&P Global, and a strategic consultant with BCG. He has over ten years of technical and strategic consulting experience working with many of the world’s largest organizations. In 2018, his company (Ghamut Corporation) was the recipient of an NSF Small Business Innovation Research grant. In 2018, Dr. Ghassemi joined Michigan State University as an Assistant Professor of Computer Science where he develops tools and systems that combine human and machine intelligence (A.I.) to solve problems that neither humans nor machines can solve as effectively alone. In 2021, he was named as one of nine individuals to serve as a National Scholar for Data and Technology Advancement at the NIH where he led the development of BRAINWORKS, a novel technology platform to visualize 40+ years of scientific knowledge as an interactive graph. He is the lead inventor on multiple US Patents, the author of a widely consumed book on health informatics (over 1 Million downloads), and has authored over 30 peer-reviewed scientific papers in venues including: Nature (Scientific Data), Science (Translational Medicine), Proceedings of the IEEE, and the Proceedings of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence. His scientific contributions have been cited over 5,000 times, and have been featured by several media outlets including: the BBC, NPR, The Wall Street Journal and Newsweek. In 2021, he was named an "AI Champion" for his contributions to the intersection of AI and medicine.