Imaging, Visualization and Simulation

Speakers

Organizers

Andrew F. Laine, DSc

Columbia University

Dr. Laine received his D.Sc. degree from Washington University (St. Louis) School of Engineering and Applied Science in Computer Science in 1989 and BS degree from Cornell University. He was a Professor in the Department of Computer and Information Sciences and Engineering at the University of Florida (Gainesville) from 1990-1997. He currently directs the Heffner Biomedical Imaging Laboratory in the Department of Biomedical Engineering and serves as Vice Chair. He holds a joint appointment in the Department of Radiology. Andrew is also an affiliated faculty member in the Department of Biomedical Informatics (College of Physicians and Surgeons) where he serves as liaison for imaging informatics as well as imaging specialist for the Center for Advanced Information Management. His research interests include methods of multi-resolution analysis applied to problems in medical imaging, image processing, computer-aided diagnosis, pattern recognition, and applied mathematics. He is a Fellow of the IEEE and Fellow of American Institute of Medical and Biological Engineers (AIMBE).

Jacqueline Merrill, RN, MPH, DNSc

Columbia University

Dr. Merrill is a public health nurse and associate research scientist in the Department of Biomedical Informatics. She holds a doctorate in nursing science with a concentration in public health informatics. As a result of her experience in clinical care, public health practice, and policy research, she has a broad knowledge of healthcare issues and particular understanding of health information technology as it relates to public health systems. Her current research takes a complex adaptive systems approach toward public health management using network analysis to improve performance in local health departments. Jackie's public health experience includes six years with the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene in the Bureau of School Health and the Office of Nursing and Quality Improvement. She is former project director at the Center for Health Policy at the School of Nursing, Columbia University. On July 1 she will return to the School of Nursing as an Associate Professor of Clinical Nursing with an interdisciplinary appointment in Biomedical Informatics.

Vincent P. Tomaselli, PhD

Center for Advanced Information Management, Columbia University

Dr. Tomaselli is currently Deputy Director of the Center for Advanced Information Management at Columbia University. Prior to joining Columbia, he was Deputy Director for Business Development and Operations at the Center for Advanced Technology in Ultrafast Photonics at the City University of New York (1994-2001). From 1990 to 1994, he was a Senior Project Scientist at Woodward-Clyde Consultants, an environmental sciences firm where he oversaw work on database management and health effects of low frequency electromagnetic fields. From 1988 to 1990, he was Director of the Center for Photonics and Imaging Science, and Professor of Electrical Engineering and Physics at Fairleigh Dickinson University (FDU), College of Science and Engineering. Prior to that, he served as Assistant Dean for Research and Graduate Studies, and University Grants Administrator. While at FDU, he was a consultant to Allied-Signal Corporation (now Honeywell), Guidance Systems Division, and a Visiting Research Scientist at the Institute for Chemistry, University of Genoa, Italy for which he received a Fulbright Award. Earlier he was a Research Physicist at the Uniroyal Research Center, Polymer Physics Department. He has a PhD in physics from New York University where his thesis work was in experimental solid-state biophysics.

Keynote Speaker

David E. Shaw, PhD

D.E. Shaw Research

Dr. Shaw serves as chief scientist of D.E. Shaw Research and as a senior research fellow at the Center for Computational Biology and Bioinformatics at Columbia University. He received his Ph.D. from Stanford University in 1980, served on the faculty of the Computer Science Department at Columbia until 1986, and founded the D.E. Shaw group in 1988. Since 2001, Dr. Shaw has been involved in hands-on research in the field of computational biochemistry. His lab is currently involved in the development of new algorithms and machine architectures for high-speed biomolecular simulations, and in the application of such simulations to basic scientific research and computer-assisted drug design. Dr. Shaw was appointed to the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology by President Clinton in 1994 and again by President Obama in 2009. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a member of the Computer Science and Telecommunications Board of the National Academies, and a winner of the ACM Gordon Bell Prize.

Speakers

Mostafa Analoui, PhD

The Livingston Group

Dr. Analoui is Head of Healthcare and Life Sciences at The Livingston Group (New York, NY) and Chairman and CEO of Cense Biosciences, Inc. Previously he was the Senior Director at Pfizer Global Research and Development. He is also adjunct Professor of Oral Pathology, Medicine and Radiology at Indiana University. Dr. Analoui is actively involved in investment, management and scientific/business development of nanotechnology, drug discovery/development, diagnostic imaging, and global strategies. While at Pfizer, he was the Site Head for Global Clinical Technology in Groton and New London, a division focusing on emerging technologies for development and validation of biomarkers and diagnostics for drug development. Prior to joining Pfizer, Dr. Analoui was the Director of Oral and Maxillofacial Imaging Research, Associate Professor of Radiology at Indiana University, and Associate Professor of Biomedical Engineering and Electrical & Comp Engineering at Purdue University. He was also President and CEO of Therametric Technology Inc. He has received his Ph.D. from Purdue University, followed by Post-Doctoral Fellowship at IBM TJ Watson Research Center in NY. In addition to industry leadership in biomedical and technology fields, he consults and lectures in US, Europe and Asia. He has also served on various scientific, regulatory, and business advisory committees and boards, including NIH, NSF, PhRMA, NASA, and OECD. Dr. Analoui has authored over 130 publications, including journal articles, book chapters and technical reports. He is senior member of IEEE, SPIE, and RSNA. He currently serves as board member of VirtualScopics (Nasdaq: VSCP), Calando Pharmaceutical (Nasdaq: ARWR), BEACON (Biomedical Engineering Alliance and Consortium) and NanoBusiness Alliance.

Yanick Beaulieu, MD

Hôpital du Sacré-Coeur de Montréal, University of Montreal

Dr. Beaulieu is Assistant Professor in the Department of Medicine, Director of the Bedside Ultrasound Curriculum at the Hôpital du Sacré-Coeur de Montréal, and Director of Ultrasound Education at CAE Healthcare. CAE is a leading provider of simulation and modeling technology to improve safety and efficiency in healthcare. Yanick held a Critical Care Medicine Fellowship (2002-04) and a Cardiology/Echocardiography Fellowship (1999-2002) at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. A graduate of McGill University Medical School, he specialized in internal medicine at the Université de Montréal (1996-99). He has received many awards, including Professor of the Year, Hôpital du Sacré-Coeur de Montréal (2004-5); Critical Care Fellow of the Year (University of Pittsburgh, 2002-3); Research Bursary from the Royal College of Physicians of Canada (2002-3); Dean's Honour List in Cardiology (2002); McLaughlin Award and Bursary for Academic Excellence (University of Montreal, 2002); Quebec's Cardiology Association Award and Bursary for Academic Excellence (2002); and a Fellowship Bursary for Academic Excellence in Cardiology (Sacred-Heart Hospital, Montreal, QC). Dr. Beaulieu has published multiple articles and book chapters on the topic of bedside ultrasound in the intensive care unit and produced a full curriculum that he is teaching to intensivists and other critical care specialists at a national and international level.

Dennis L. Fowler, MD, MPH

Columbia University

Dr. Fowler completed a Surgical Endoscopy Fellowship in 1980 at Massachusetts General Hospital, where he focused on advancing and teaching minimally invasive surgery, after having previously attended medical school and completed a general surgery residency in Kansas City. He joined the minimal access field just as technology entered clinical practice in 1990, and was recruited by Columbia in 2000 from his directorship of the Allegheny Center for Laparoscopic and Minimally Invasive Surgery in Pittsburgh. At Columbia, he directed the Minimal Access Surgery Center (MASC) from 2000-2008, during which time he served as Chief of the Division of General Surgery at Weill Cornell Medical College (2002-2004) and Vice President and Medical Director for Perioperative Services at New York-Presbyterian/Columbia (2004-2008). While Director of Columbia's MASC, Dennis pioneered the field of laparoscopy as an innovator of minimal access surgery devices and procedures. His work with the MASC involved surgical skills training and assessment for Department of Surgery residents, as well as licensed practitioners. He has published extensively on the topics of minimally invasive surgery, technology development, and surgical education. In 2008, he received his MPH degree from Columbia University, and now focuses on improved healthcare outcomes, bringing innovative technology to market (e.g. robotics to reduce the complexity of minimally invasive surgery), the use of simulation for educating healthcare providers, and healthcare delivery.In November 2010, Dennis was appointed Director of the newly established Reemtsma Center for Innovation and Outcomes Research.

David Gotz, PhD

IBM T.J. Watson Research Center

Dr. Gotz is a member of the multi-disciplinary Healthcare Transformation Research Group at IBM. His research focus is on visual analytics, information visualization, and intelligent user interfaces. His work has targeted a variety of application areas ranging from business intelligence to super-computer system administration. His current work explores interactive visual technologies and their applications in the healthcare field. While at IBM, David has been a co-inventor on ten patent-pending innovations in these areas. David received his PhD in Computer Science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2005. Prior to his PhD studies, David received a BS in Computer Science and a Certificate in Economics from Georgia Tech in 1999 where he graduated with Highest Honors. David is an active participant in the academic community, serving as a committee member and reviewer for several leading conferences and journals. He has published numerous papers in peer-reviewed conferences and journals in the areas of visualization, user-interfaces, multimedia systems, and medical informatics, including a paper from the most recent AMIA Symposium (2010) on evidence-based prognostics in healthcare that was a Distinguished Paper Award nominee.

Shunichi Homma, MD

Columbia University Medical Center

Dr. Homma is the Margaret Milliken Hatch Professor of Medicine at the Columbia University Medical Center, where he serves as the Associate Chief of the Cardiology Division as well as the Director of Noninvasive Cardiac Imaging. He also holds an appointment at the Fu School of Engineering at Columbia University. Dr. Homma collaborates extensively with the Department of Biomedical Engineering in developing new ultrasound techniques for cardiac diagnoses, and serves on the PhD Dissertation Committee. He is a graduate of Dartmouth College and Albert Einstein College of Medicine. He has finished internal medicine residency at the Montefiore Medical Center, and cardiology training at Massachusetts General Hospital and Columbia–Presbyterian Medical Center. Dr. Homma is credited with over 500 publications and holds a variety of NIH grants.

Nathaniel Hupert, MD, MPH

Weill Cornell Medical College

Dr. Hupert is a primary care internal medicine specialist and a researcher in public health emergency response and medical decision making. He currently serves as the Director of the Preparedness Modeling Unit of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), in addition to being Associate Professor of Public Health and Medicine at Cornell University's Weill Medical College in New York City. He trained at Harvard Medical School, the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, and the Harvard School of Public Health. His research area is computational public health, the application of mathematical and simulation modeling techniques to health problems that extend beyond the bounds of traditional epidemiology. Since September 2000, he has collaborated with local, state, federal, and international public health officials in a series of federally financed research projects on hospital and clinical preparedness for bioterrorism. He led the development of a series of computer simulations to study mass antibiotic distribution and hospital capacity in the event of a large-scale release of a bio-weapon or other catastrophic health event. Since 2005, he has worked in close collaboration with colleagues in the Engineering/Operations Research community to bring state-of-the-art engineering solutions to critical public health problems. Hupert serves on the Anthrax Modeling Working Group of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) and was a member of the 2007 RAND Expert Panel on Defining Public Health Preparedness. He has participated in a number of national webcasts on bioterrorism preparedness for the CDC's Strategic National Stockpile program and for the DHHS Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. His training includes A.B., Harvard College (1988); M.D., Harvard Medical School (1994); and M.P.H., Harvard School of Public Health (2000).

Harold Litt, MD, PhD

University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine

Dr. Litt is Chief of the Cardiovascular Imaging section in the Department of Radiology at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. After obtaining A.B. and A.M. degrees in physics at Harvard University, and an M.D. and Ph.D. in biophysics from SUNY at Buffalo, he undertook an internship at Mount Auburn Hospital-Harvard Medical School and residency in diagnostic radiology at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. Following fellowship training in cardiothoracic radiology at the University of California at San Francisco, he returned to Penn, where he is currently Assistant Professor of Radiology and Medicine. Dr. Litt's research concerns novel methods and applications of Computed Tomography and Magnetic Resonance Imaging in cardiovascular disease, including methods for visualization of large clinical imaging datasets. He is currently principal investigator of a large, multicenter trial sponsored by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania Tobacco Settlement Fund comparing CT with usual care for evaluation of patients presenting to emergency departments with chest pain.

Patricia Ordóñez Rozo, MS

University of Maryland, Baltimore County

Ms. Ordóñez is a doctoral candidate in the Computer Science and Electrical Engineering Department at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC). Her anticipated graduation date is August, 2011. She received her M.S. in Computer Science from UMBC in August 2010 and her B. A. in Hispanic and Italian Studies from Johns Hopkins University in 1989. Her current research centers on her dissertation, entitled "Multivariate Time Series Analysis of Physiological and Clinical Data." She is interested in creating clinical decision support systems that aid medical providers to efficiently diagnose and treat patients, and that personalize medicine by applying data mining, machine learning, and visualization techniques to data warehouses of electronic medical data. Patti has served as a lecturer of several undergraduate courses at UMBC during graduate school and as a technical trainer in industry for over 10 years. Prior to delving into technology, she taught high school math and Spanish and coached field hockey. In 2007, she received a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship to complete her doctorate, which permitted her to pursue her interests in biomedical informatics in collaboration with medical professors at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. In 2008, her paper, Visualizing Multivariate Time Series Data to Detect Specific Medical Conditions, was nominated for the Best Student Paper Award at AMIA 2008.