Future of Medical Imaging – Speakers, Moderators and Panelists

Suehyun Cho earned her Ph.D. in Electrical, Computer, and Energy Engineering from the University of Colorado Boulder. Her research involved synthesis and surface modification of functional nanoclusters that allow simultaneous detection and treatment of cancer. Suehyun’s research interest include in situ detection and targeted delivery and treatment. Currently, she is a senior researcher at Bionaut Labs Inc., developing methods for remote, targeted, and localized delivery of drugs.

Bruce Daniel is a Professor of Diagnostic Radiology and, by courtesy, of Bioengineering. He joined Stanford in 1995 after training at the University of Michigan and Harvard Medical School. His clinical focus is magnetic resonance imaging, where he actively performs and interprets examinations of the breast, and body including liver, abdomen, pelvis and prostate. He has a particular interest in MRI-guided interventions as well, especially MRI-guided biopsies and localizations in the breast. His research has focused on developing new MRI technologies for diagnosis and procedure guidance for breast cancer and prostate cancer, including advanced imaging methods, as well as close collaborations with mechanical engineers in the Biomimetic and Dextrous Manipulation laboratory developing novel mechanical apparatus for guidance, manipulation, and sensing during remote interventions. Dr. Daniel is the Co-Directory of the Incubator for Medical Mixed and Extended Reality at Stanford (IMMERS) and leading efforts to develop mixed-reality to guide surgery in the breast and other organs. He is a member of the Council of Distinguished Investigators of the Academy for Radiology Research, and a fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering.

Mark Griswold, PhD, is Professor of Radiology at Case Western Reserve University with appointments in the departments of Biomedical Engineering, Physics, and Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. He is also the Director of MRI Research and Faculty Director of the Interactive Commons (IC), a campus-wide institute that develops collaborative applications to communicate and visualize information in new ways, including Microsoft’s HoloLens. He is a Fellow of the American Institute of Medical and Biological Engineering, Fellow of the International Society of Magnetic Resonance in Medicine and a Fellow of the National Academy of Inventors. Among his internationally known imaging discoveries, Dr. Griswold developed Magnetic Resonance Fingerprinting (MRF), a highly quantitative and objective form of MRI. At the IC, Dr. Griswold connects individuals in unconventional, multidisciplinary networks and applies visualization technologies, such as Microsoft HoloLens, to advance learning and solve society’s most pressing challenges.

Mr Gura is the CEO and Chairman of Zebra Medical Vision, a deep learning medical imaging company that will enable scalable healthcare for the 2 billion people to join the middle class by 2025. Eyal is an Angel investor and previously venture capitalist with Pitango Venture Capital, the largest venture fund in the Middle East. Formerly, Co-Founder: PicScout (acquired by Getty Images); PicApp (acquired by Ybrant Digital); The Gifts Project (acquired by eBay). Adviser, WebTeb.com, the leading Arabic medical portal. Member, Advisory Board, Tmura.org. Member of the Board, Latet. Founding Member, Tovanotb.org. Eyal is a faculty member at IDC's Zell entrepreneurship program and a graduate of the Wharton Business School of the University of Pennsylvania. In 2014 Eyal was named a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum.

Raphael Guzman is Professor of Neurosurgery and Vice Chairman of the Department of Neurosurgery at the University Hospital Basel and the University Children’s Hospital of Basel (UKBB). He also holds joint appointments in the Department of Bioengineering and Biomedicine. His clinical expertise is in Cerebrovascular and Pediatric Neurosurgery.Prior to joining the faculty at the University Hospital in Basel, Dr. Guzman was an Assistant Professor of Neurosurgery at Stanford University. Prof. Guzman’s laboratory research group examines the clinical relevance of neural stem/progenitor cells (NPC) in brain ischemia and particularly in neonatal hypoxic-ischemia (HI) with regard to white matter regeneration. The Guzman lab is involved in several international and national collaborations with clinical and research groups in Basel including Neonatology and Pediatric Neurology Departments at UKBB, Stroke Neurology and Roche Pharma. Prof. Guzman’s clinical research group explores new technologies such as AR and VR to improve surgical outcome, neurosurgical resident teaching, patient education and student education. In close collaboration with the Department of Bioengineering and Industry he explores the application of novel surgical virtual reality software and intraoperative augmented reality in neurosurgical microscopy.

Dr. Holsinger is Professor and Chief of Head and Neck Surgery at Stanford University. He received his medical degree from Vanderbilt School of Medicine, completed his internship and residency at Baylor College of Medicine and his Fellowship in head and neck surgical oncology at The University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center. In 2003, he was awarded Fulbright Scholarship to study surgery at the University of Paris with Professor Ollivier Laccourreye and with Professor Wolfgang Steiner at the Georg-August University in Göttingen. From 2003-2013, Dr. Holsinger worked at the Department of Head and Neck Surgery at the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center where he founded and led the Program in Minimally Invasive and Endoscopic Head and Neck Surgery and co-directed the program in Minimally Invasive Technology in Oncologic Surgery.
Dr. Holsinger’s surgical practice focuses on the surgical management of benign and malignant diseases of the thyroid, as well as head and neck cancer. His areas of research interest include endoscopic head and neck surgery, including transoral robotic surgery and transoral laser microsurgery, as well as time-honoured approaches of conservation laryngeal surgery and supracricoid partial laryngectomy. His research focuses on surgical innovation and clinical trials through NCI-funded cooperative groups. In 2014, he began a prospective clinical trial to evaluate multispectral imaging of patients with oropharyngeal cancer, in an effort to discern tumor from tumor. Currently, he leads a study to evaluate hyper-spectral imaging to improve surgical vision.

Jeff Kleck (Menlo Park, CA) is an Adjunct Professor in the School of Medicine. He is also one of the Silicon Valley’s leading healthcare technology and software entrepreneurs. He was most recently President of iSchemaView (privately held). Before building iSchemaView he was Founder and the CEO and Chairman of Attainia (acquired by private equity). Prior to Attainia he was Founder and the CEO and Chairman of Neoforma (NASDAQ: NEOF), which was purchased by GHX (privately held). Before Neoforma he held two management positions at Varian (NYSE: VAR). Dr. Kleck holds a PhD in Biomedical Physics from UCLA (former faculty), an MS in Engineering Management from Stanford University (current faculty), and an MS and a BS in Nuclear Engineering from Texas A&M University (current advisor). He also holds numerous certifications, licenses, and patents.

Dr. Langlotz’s laboratory investigates the use of deep neural networks and other machine learning technologies to help radiologists detect disease and eliminate diagnostic errors. His laboratory’s translational approach facilitates rapid evaluation and dissemination of the resulting algorithms. He is responsible for the information technology that supports Stanford’s radiology practice, including 6 million imaging studies that require 0.5 petabytes of storage. Dr. Langlotz has led many recent national and international efforts to improve the quality of radiology communication, including the RadLex™ terminology standard, the RadLex™ Playbook of radiology exam codes, the RSNA report template library, and a technical standard for communication of radiology templates. He has published over 100 scholarly articles, and is author of the recent book “The Radiology Report: A Guide to Thoughtful Communication for Radiologists and Other Medical Professionals”.
Raised in St. Paul, Minnesota, Dr. Langlotz received his undergraduate degree in Human Biology, masters in Computer Science, MD in Medicine, and PhD in Medical Information Science, all from Stanford University. He is a founder and past president of the Radiology Alliance for Health Services Research, served as chair of the Society for Imaging Informatics in Medicine (SIIM), and as a board member of the American Medical Informatics Association and the Association of University Radiologists. He is a fellow of the American College of Medical Informatics and currently serves as president of the College of SIIM Fellows and as a board member of the Radiological Society of North America. He is a recipient of the Lee B. Lusted Research Prize from the Society of Medical Decision Making and the Career Achievement Award from the Radiology Alliance for Health Services Research. He has founded three healthcare information technology companies, most recently Montage Healthcare Solutions, which was acquired by Nuance Communications in 2016.

Joseph Liao is currently Associate Professor of Urology at Stanford University and Chief of Urology at the Veterans Affairs Palo Alto Health Care System. He earned his A.B. in Biology from Harvard College in 1993 and M.D. from Stanford University School of Medicine in 1997. After completing his urology residency and fellowship in endourology/minimally invasive surgery at UCLA, he joined the Department of Urology at Stanford in 2006, where he is also a member of Bio-X interdisciplinary research program, Stanford Cancer Institute, and Institute for Immunity, Transplantation, and Infection. Dr. Liao is a surgeon-scientist who maintains an active clinical practice focusing on minimally invasive surgery and urologic oncology. His laboratory focuses on development and translation of optical molecular imaging for urological cancer and urine-based molecular diagnostics. Dr. Liao has pioneered the application of confocal endomicroscopy in the urinary tract, endoscopic molecular imaging of bladder cancer, an in vitro molecular diagnostics for urinary tract infections and bladder cancer. He has served as the principal investigator on several R01 grants from the National Institutes of Health, as well as a standing member of the NIH Instrument Systems Development study section. He is an author of over 100 manuscripts and the editor of the textbook Advances in Image-Guided Urologic Surgery. He has been an invited speaker to numerous international meetings including the Gordon Research Conferences, IEEE-NANOMED, IEEE-NEMS, SPIE, Society of Urologic Oncology, Endourology Society, American Urological Association, and European Association of Urology.

Laura Marcu is a full professor at the University of California, Davis in the Department of Biomedical Engineering (College of Engineering). She holds a joint appointment in the Department of the Neurological Surgery (UC Davis School of Medicine). Prior of joining UC Davis in 2006 she served as the Director of the Biophotonics Research Laboratory at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles and was a Research Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering-Electrophysics and Biomedical Engineering at the University of Southern California.
Prof. Marcu’s research is in the area of biomedical optics, with a particular focus on research for development of optical techniques for tissue diagnostics. Her laboratory has developed time-resolved fluorescence spectroscopy (TRFS) and fluorescence lifetime imaging microscopy (FLIM) systems for in-vivo tissue interrogation including human patients. Her current research focuses on the development of optical spectroscopy and imaging techniques for medical diagnostics and the integration of these techniques in multimodal tissue diagnostic platforms including high-frequency ultrasound technologies. Prof. Marcu has more than 150 publications related to the development and application of optical technologies to tissue diagnostics and holds seven US patents. She is also a co-editor of the first textbook in “Fluorescence Lifetime Spectroscopy and Imaging: Principles and Applications in Biomedical Diagnostics”.
Prof. Marcu is a Fellow of the Optical Society (OSA), the International Society for Optics and Photonics (SPIE), the Biomedical Engineering Society (BMES) and the American Institute American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineers (AIMBE). She was the recipient of a Leverhulme Trust Visiting Professorship (host Imperial College of London, Department of Physics).

Craig Mermel, MD, PhD is the Product Lead for Pathology at Google AI. Dr. Mermel holds a BA in Mathematics and Biochemistry from Washington University in St. Louis. He obtained his MD from Harvard Medical School and obtained a PhD in Genetics from Harvard University. His thesis dissertation, titled “The Analysis of Somatic Copy Number Alteration in Human Cancers,” was completed in the laboratory of Dr. Matthew Meyerson at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT. Dr. Mermel completed residency training in Clinical Pathology at the Massachusetts General Hospital and is board-certified in Clinical Pathology by the American Board of Pathology. Prior to assuming his current role, Dr. Mermel worked as a software engineer at Apple, Inc where he worked on Health Special Projects.

Dr. Daniel Perez is an Associate Professor and residency Program Director in the Department of Oral & Maxillofacial Surgery at the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio.

Dr. Perez was born in San Jose, Costa Rica where he obtained his dental degree from the University of Costa Rica. He completed his residency at the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana and his fellowship in Orthognathic and TMJ Surgery at Baylor University Medical Center in Dallas.

He moved to San Antonio to join the program in 2009. Dr. Perez field of interests includes: trauma, facial reconstructive surgery, temporomandibular joint disorders, sleep apnea, and orthognathic surgery among others.

Pranav is a 4th year PhD candidate in the Stanford Machine Learning Group co-advised by Professor Andrew Ng and Professor Percy Liang. He works on the development and deployment of deep learning algorithms for automated diagnosis, prognosis, and treatment of diseases. He developed models for automated detection of arrhythmias, multiple pathology detection under uncertainty for x-rays (CheXNet, MURA, CheXNeXt), and augmentation of experts in knee MRI interpretation (MRNet). He also developed SQuAD, a machine reading comprehension dataset.

Travis Richardson is Chief Executive Officer of Flywheel, a biomedical research informatics platform leveraging the power of cloud-scale computing infrastructure to address the increasing complexity of modern computational science and machine learning. Mr. Richardson has over 25 years of executive leadership experience in product development, strategy, and innovation at both large and small companies including Schneider Electric, Oracle, cloud information service provider, DTN, and Minneapolis-based White Pine Consulting Group.

Most of Mr. Richardson’s career has been focused on his passion for data management, data quality, and application interoperability to provide real-world solutions in industries including telecommunications, energy, and supply-chain. He is particularly excited to be leveraging his data management and analytics experience to enable a new generation of innovative solutions for healthcare with enormous potential to accelerate scientific discovery and advance precision care.

Eben Rosenthal is a surgeon-scientist and academic leader. He is currently serving as the John and Ann Doerr Medical Director of the Stanford Cancer Center, a position he has held since July 2015. Before coming to Stanford, he learned his surgical skills in otolaryngology from the University of Michigan and traveled west for further training in facial plastic and reconstructive surgery at the Oregon Health and Science University. He joined the faculty at University of Alabama at Birmingham where he started as an Assistant Professor of Surgery within the Division of Otolaryngology. In 2012, Dr. Rosenthal became Division Director of Otolaryngology – Head and Neck Surgery and the holder of the John S. Odess Endowed Chair at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. He moved to Stanford in 2015 to become the Ann and John Doerr Medical Director of the Stanford Cancer Center.
Dr. Rosenthal has performed preclinical and clinical research on the role of targeted therapies for use to treat cancer alone and in combination with conventional therapy. He served as principal investigator on several early phase investigator-initiated and industry sponsored clinical trials in molecular oncology. He received grant funding from the American Cancer Society, NIH/NCI and NIH/NIDCR to study the role of targeted therapy and novel imaging strategies in cancer.
Dr. Rosenthal has conducted bench to bedside development of optical contrast agents to identify cancer in the operating room. He led a multidisciplinary team of scientists through successful IND application to allow testing of fluorescently labeled antibodies in the clinic and operating room.

Jonathan grew up nearby in San Jose and was first introduced to medical imaging while interning at Acuson, after his father told him to do something other than go to the beach during the summer. He studied bioengineering at UC San Diego, and wound up working in the laboratory of Andrew McCulloch, studying cardiac mechanics. Elliot McVeigh showed him a cine loop of a cardiac MRI during his graduate school interview and he thus wound up using the modality to study the effects of gene and stem cell therapies on ischemic heart disease at John Hopkins School of Medicine. Following his wife back to California, Jonathan rediscovered surfing and started to take flying lessons before he met Greg Kovacs, who was helping to start up the bioengineering department at Stanford. After a few years at Stanford, Jonathan took a job at Varian Medical Systems in a group that managed research collaborations and sought to learn more about radiation biology. At Intuitive Surgical, he leads a research group that explores new applications of surgical robotics to assist in unmet clinical needs. Dr. Sorger has been involved in several clinical trials and Investigational New Drug applications regarding medical imaging agents and is the author of several publications & patents.

Yona Vaisbuch joined Stanford Otolaryngology after graduating residency in TelAviv and is currently a clinical instructor in Otology/Neurotology. He received an Innovation Fellowship from Stanford Byer’s Center for Biodesign and is a mentor to Stanford’s Mobile Health Biodesign course.

Dr. Vaisbuch co-invented “The Magicapsule” a biofeedback mobile app connected to a smart watch that helps cancer patients deal with chemotherapy side effects. He is also an inventor of a middle ear prosthesis, based on mechanical engineering and clinical anatomy translation research. Dr. Vaisbuch participates in the Spark Program in Translational Research at Stanford and is the program manager of the Stanford-Rambam Institute for Medical Innovation.

Dr. Vaisbuch’s clinical focus includes the surgical and radio-surgical treatments of skull base tumors, cochlear implants and surgical reconstruction of the hearing bones and his research focuses on curing hearing loss through hair cell regeneration and the application of multispectral imaging for surgery.

Dr. Vasanawala received his bachelor’s degree in mathematics from Caltech, and then completed his medical training and PhD at Stanford. His research efforts are focused on developing fast and quantitative MRI methods. He serves as the Director of MRI at Stanford Hospital and Clinics and at Stanford Children’s. He also serves as the division chief of Body MRI.

Dr. Vasanawala’s group is focused on developing new MRI techniques, and in particular, developing novel applications for children. They take a comprehensive approach, exploring novel hardware, MRI pulse sequence techniques, and motion correction methods. These approaches are then evaluated for cardiovascular, abdominal, and musculoskeletal pediatric MRI exams. Additionally, they seek to develop quantitative MRI methods, including those for cardiovascular function, renal function, and tumor perfusion.