Yuntong (Lorin) Ma, MD, MPhil, Joins VA Medical Center

We are pleased to welcome Yuntong (Lorin) Ma, MD, MPhil, as a new assistant professor in Clinical Radiology at the VA Medical Center.

Dr. Ma earned her medical degree at Washington University School of Medicine in St Louis, followed by internship at Santa Clara Valley Medical Center in San Jose, CA. Dr. Ma completed diagnostic radiology residency at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston where she was a clinical fellow at Harvard Medical School. In 2023, Dr. Ma completed her fellowship in musculoskeletal imaging at Stanford, where she was also a clinical scholar. Dr. Ma holds an MPhil in Sociology from St. John’s College, Cambridge University, where she was a Gates Cambridge Scholar conducting research on the socio-ethical implications of emerging technologies, using the CRISPR-Cas9 genome editing system as a case study.

During residency, Dr. Ma’s research examined the role of radiologic-pathologic correlation for decision-making after non-diagnostic CT-guided lung biopsies and investigated the diagnostic accuracy of pelvic radiographs for the detection of traumatic pelvic fractures in the elderly. In her final year of residency, Dr. Ma participated in the Mass General Brigham Data Science Office (DSO) Data Science Pathway (DSP) to learn the fundamentals of artificial intelligence and machine learning in healthcare, and through this work developed a deep learning algorithm to differentiate rheumatoid arthritis from osteoarthritis on hand radiography. This work received the Senior Research Award for Dr. Ma’s presentation on “Deep learning discrimination of rheumatoid arthritis from osteoarthritis on hand radiography.”

As an educator, Dr. Ma co-authored the MSK chapter of the second edition of the widely used Core Radiology.

"This is an exciting time of growth and renewal at the VA, and Dr. Ma will be a key contributor to the clinical practice at the VA and to our department’s research initiatives in data science and artificial intelligence,” said department Chair Chris Hess, MD, PhD. “She joins neuroradiologist Pratik Mukherjee, MD, PhD; interventional radiologist Rajiv Sawhney, MD; Radiologist-in-Chief Michael Parsa, MD; and our prolific research faculty group at the VA under the direction of David Saloner, PhD."

Thank you to Thomas Hope, MD, for chairing the academic search for UCSF, and Christine Glastonbury, MBBS, and the Academic Affairs team for their coordination of this search.

Please join us in extending a warm welcome to Dr. Ma. We are delighted she has chosen to join our community.