Conversation with Vivek Natarajan

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.

Dr. Nazha is an internationally known expert and a keynote speaker in the application of artificial intelligence and novel digital technologies such as blockchain, IoT, and others in healthcare, pharma, and life sciences. He is also an internationally recognized expert in treating patients with leukemia. His research focuses on the use of artificial intelligence, machine learning, and deep learning to translate genomic and complex healthcare data into useful clinical tools that can improve patient outcomes. He is currently and Executive Director of Early Clinical Development at Incyte. Prior to joining Incyte, Dr. Nazha was a Global Tech Business Development for Healthcare Solutions at Amazon Web Services. He was tasked in building innovative healthcare solutions using machine learning, AI, cloud computing and other digital services to accelerate the adaptation of digital technologies in healthcare. Prior to joining Amazon, Dr. Nazha was the Director of the Cleveland Clinic Center for Clinical Artificial Intelligence and an Associate Medical Director at Enterprise Analytics. He was also an Assistant Professor of Medicine at Lerner College of Medicine/Case Western Reserve University and an Associate Staff at the Department of Hematology and Medical Oncology at Taussig Cancer Institute, Cleveland Clinic.

In this episode of BrainX talks we talk to Edward "Ed" Marx. Ed serves as Chief Executive Officer of Divurgent. Divurgent is a solutions provider focused on what matters most to our client partners. Divurgent disrupts the typical value equation by using data-infused, flexible, and scalable solutions that demonstrate and quantify value for our partners. Edward is active on Boards, writing books and speaks globally. Marx is an influential, veteran IT leader with deep experience in healthcare. He was the former Chief Digital Officer (CDO) for Tech Mahindra Health & Life Sciences and former Chief Information Officer (CIO) for Cleveland Clinic. He was also the governor-appointed chairman of the Texas Health Services Authority for eight years. In recent years, two major national healthcare information technology organizations, the College of Healthcare Information Management Executives (CHIME) and the Healthcare Information Management Systems Society (HIMSS), named Marx the CIO of the year and listed him as one of the top 10 disruptive forces in healthcare. CIO and Computer World named Marx one of the “Top 100 Leaders,” and the Dallas Business Journal named him “Newcomer of the Year.” Marx has won the coveted “People’s Choice” HISsies Award for top healthcare CIO four years in a row, and Becker’s Healthcare named him one of the “Top 25 Most Influential Executives in Healthcare,” one of the “Top 26 Smartest Healthcare IT Professionals,” and one of the “17 Most Influential Leaders in Healthcare.” Under his leadership, Texas Health hospitals and Cleveland Clinic achieved the highest designation (Stage 7) of the HIMSS Electronic Medical Record Adoption Model (EMRAM) and won the coveted “Davies Award” twice for best use of technology to enable business and clinical outcomes. Edward is married to Simran and they have five children and four grandchildren. Simran holds a doctor of nursing practice (DNP). Both wellness fanatics, they love to exercise together and hike throughout the world. They co-wrote a book on marriage to be released in 2023. Edward is a 9+ year member of TeamUSA Triathlon and represents his country at championship events around the world.

Dr Janak Gunatilleke has more than 16 years’ experience in healthcare. He has a specialised skill set, with experience both working as a medical doctor and developing and implementing data-driven and technology-enabled improvements in healthcare. He co-founded the AI technology firm Conscient AI Labs. Janak was a member of the evaluation panel for the NHS AI in Health and Care Award and is a fellow of the Faculty of Clinical Informatics in the UK. He has an Executive MBA from the University of Cambridge and is completing his dissertation for a Master’s in Data Science,                                                          Technology and Innovation from the University of Edinburgh.More information on his thinking at https://www.unlockaiforhealth.com/

In this episode we are joined by Dr. Pallavi Tiwari, Associate Professor in Radiology, and the co-director of Imaging and Radiation Sciences in the Carbone Cancer Center at University of Wisconsin Madison. Her research interests lie in machine learning, data mining, and image analysis for personalized medicine solutions in oncology and neurological disorders. Over the last 15 years, her research has been focused on developing novel image analysis methods for diagnosis, prognosis, and evaluating treatment response for different types of cancers as well as neurological disorders. Her research has so far evolved into over 60 peer-reviewed publications, 50 peer-reviewed abstracts, and 12 patents (7 issued, 5 pending). Dr. Tiwari has been a recipient of several scientific awards, most notably being named as one of 100 women achievers by Government of India for making a positive impact in the field of Science and Innovation. In 2018, she was selected as one of Crain’s Business Cleveland Forty under 40. In 2020, she was awarded the J&J. Women in STEM (WiSTEM2D) scholar award in Technology. In 2021, she was awarded the Honorary Early Career Achievement Award through the Society for Imaging informatics in Medicine. Dr. Tiwari has received certification of commendation from the General Assembly of the State of Ohio and from Ohio Secretary of State for her work in brain tumors. Dr. Tiwari’s team has secured over $7.5M in grant funding for their research, through the National Cancer Institute, Department of Defense, and various foundation and state grants.