Towards Computer-Enabled Precision Radiology and Neurology

The dawning era of precision medicine requires a tight integration of medicine with the computational sciences. In particular, imaging-facilitated informatics represents one of the largest, most promising opportunities, but there are many challenges. Dr. Raj will descrie how research in his laboratory at Weill Cornell, the Image Data Evaluation and Analytics Laboratory (IDEAL), is furthering this goal, with a dual mission of both basic research and state of the art informatics, computational and clinical research. In the first part of this talk, Dr. Raj will highlight some ongoing imaging informatics, clinical and support service projects -- all supported by his custom Research PACS and computing infrastructure. In the second part he will focus on original basic resarch on advanced medical imaging, visual computing, graph interference, and computational neurology. In particular, he will discuss his proposed "Network Diffusion" model of the spread of neurodegenterative diseases within the brain, and its use in computational prognostication. He will also highlight recent advances in graphical models of brain activity and function. Taken together, these efforts open a way forward for precision neurology and imaging-facilitated precision health. To that end, he will suggest some future directions, in particular, the emerging science of imaging genetics.