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Interpreter of Maladies: AI for Precision Medicine

Anant Madabhushi, Ph.D.
Donnell Institute Professor of Biomedical Engineering
Director, Center for Computational Imaging and Personalized Diagnostics
Case Western Reserve University
 

ABSTRACT
Traditional biology generally looks at only a few aspects of an organism at a time and attempts to molecularly dissect diseases and study them part by part with the hope that the sum of knowledge of parts would help explain the operation of the whole. Rarely has this been a successful strategy to understand the causes and cures for complex diseases. The motivation for a systems based approach to disease understanding aims to understand how large numbers of interrelated health variables, gene expression profiling, its cellular architecture and microenvironment, as seen in its histological image features, its 3 dimensional tissue architecture and vascularization, as seen in dynamic contrast enhanced (DCE) MRI, and its metabolic features, as seen by Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopy (MRS) or Positron Emission Tomography (PET), result in emergence of definable phenotypes. At the Center for Computational Imaging and Personalized Diagnostics (CCIPD) at Case Western Reserve University, we have been developing computerized knowledge alignment, representation, and fusion tools for integrating and correlating heterogeneous biological data spanning different spatial and temporal scales, modalities, and functionalities. These tools include computerized feature analysis methods for extracting subvisual attributes for characterizing disease appearance and behavior on radiographic (radiomics) and digitized pathology images (pathomics). In this talk I will discuss the development work in CCIPD on new radiomic and pathomic approaches for capturing intra-tumoral heterogeneity and modeling tumor appearance. I will also focus my talk on how these radiomic and pathomic approaches can be applied to predicting disease outcome, recurrence, progression and response to therapy in the context of prostate, brain, rectal, oropharyngeal, and lung cancers. Additionally, I will also discuss some recent work on looking at use of pathomics in the context of racial health disparity and creation of more precise and tailored prognostic and response prediction models.
 

BIOGRAPHY
Anant Madabhushi, PhD, is the Donnell Institute Professor of biomedical engineering at Case Western Reserve University (CWRU) in Cleveland and director of the university’s Center for Computational Imaging and Personalized Diagnostics (CCIPD). He is also a Research Scientist at the Louis Stokes Cleveland Veterans Administration (VA) Medical Center and has affiliate appointments both at University Hospitals and Cleveland Clinic. He holds secondary appointments in the departments of Biomedical Engineering, Urology, Radiology, Pathology, Radiation Oncology, Electrical Engineering & Computer Science and Gen Med Sciences at CWRU.

Madabhushi’s team at CCIPD is developing and applying novel Artificial Intelligence and machine learning approaches for the diagnosis, prognosis and prediction of therapy response for a variety of diseases including several different types of cancers, cardiovascular disease, kidney and eye disease. The Center is located in Cleveland’s unique medical ecosystem, an extensive clinical network within which it boasts numerous successful collaborations including with the Cleveland Clinic and the Cole Eye Institute, University Hospitals, the VA Louis Stokes Medical Center, MetroHealth, and the Case Comprehensive Cancer Center at CWRU.

Madabhushi has more than 100 patents either issued or pending in the areas of medical image analysis, computer-aided diagnosis, and computer vision, more than 75 of which are issued. He was responsible for more than 10 percent of all patents awarded to Case Western Reserve University, every year, since 2017.

The author of more than 450 peer-reviewed journal articles and conference papers, Madabhushi is a sought after lecturer who has delivered more than 350 talks around the world. His efforts as a professor and researcher have gained international attention in the field of biomedical engineering, garnering him several awards. Most notably, Madabhushi is a fellow of the American Institute of Medical and Biomedical Engineering (AIMBE), a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and a fellow of the National Academy of Inventors (NAI). In 2015, he made Crain’s Cleveland Business magazine’s “Forty under 40” list. In 2019, 2020, and 2021 Madabhushi was named to The Pathologist's Power List, a list of 100 most inspiring professionals in pathology and laboratory medicine. In 2020, he received the Diekhoff Award for Distinguished Graduate Student Mentoring at CWRU. In 2021 he was honored as one of Crain’s Cleveland Business Notable Entrepreneurs of the year and also was conferred a Faculty Distinguished Research Award by CWRU.

Madabhushi’s work on developing “smart computers for identifying lung cancer patients who will benefit from chemotherapy” was ranked as one of the top 10 medical breakthroughs of 2018 by Prevention Magazine. In 2019, Nature Magazine called him out as one of five scientists pursuing truly offbeat and innovative approaches in cancer research. His work on using AI for addressing health disparities, especially in identifying differences in appearance of prostate cancer between black and white men, received national attention in 2020.
Madabhushi has secured almost $80 million in grant funding and co-founded two companies, Vascuvis Inc. (now Elucid Bioimaging) and IbRiS Inc., which was acquired by Inspirata in 2015. He has been involved in several sponsored research and industry partnerships with medical imaging and pharmaceutical companies. In addition, more than 30 technologies developed by Madabhushi’s team have been licensed.