Gari David Clifford | |
---|---|
Nationality | British-American |
Occupation(s) | Physicist, Biomedical Engineer, Academic, and Researcher |
Awards | PhysioNet/Computing in Cardiology Challenge (2008, 2012, 2013, 2014) Martin Black Award, Institute of Physics (2009) Engineering World Health Design Award (2012) ‘Best Innovation Leveraging Technology’, Dell Social Innovation Challenge (2012) Max Harry Weil Memorial Award, The Society for Critical Care Med (2020) |
Academic background | |
Education | B.S., Physics & Electronics M.Sc., Mathematical and Theoretical Physics D.Phil., Engineering |
Alma mater | University of Exeter University of Southampton University of Oxford |
Academic work | |
Institutions | Emory University Georgia Institute of Technology |
Gari David Clifford is a British-American physicist,biomedical engineer,academic,and researcher. He is the Chair of Emory's Department of Biomedical Informatics and a Professor of Biomedical Engineering and Biomedical Informatics at Emory University and Georgia Institute of Technology. [1]
Clifford has authored over 400 publications,and has multiple patents awarded. His research is focused on scalable and affordable healthcare,and his major application areas include,Cardiovascular Disease,Circadian Rhythms and Sleep,Maternal/Fetal Health and Neuropsychiatric Diseases. [2]
Clifford is the Director of the PhysioNet/Computing in Cardiology Challenges, [3] the co-founder and CTO of MindChild Medical Inc.,and the co-founder of LifeBell AI,where he serves as a Chief Scientific Officer. He is the Deputy Editor of IOP Journal of Physiological Measurement, [4] and has served as an International Advisory Board Member of the Research Resource for Complex Physiologic Signals (otherwise known as ‘PhysioNet’).
Clifford studied at the University of Exeter and received his bachelor's degree in Physics and Electronics in 1992. He then earned a master's degree in Theoretical Physics from the University of Southampton in 1995,and his Doctoral degree in Biomedical Engineering from the University of Oxford in 2003. [1]
Following his Doctoral degree,he joined Massachusetts Institute of Technology as a Postdoctoral Fellow in 2003,then Research Scientist in 2004,and Principal Research Scientist from 2005 to 2009. From 2009 to 2014,he was appointed as an Associate Professor of Biomedical Engineering at the University of Oxford,and subsequently as a Visiting Professor from 2014 to 2017. He held concurrent appointments as Associate Professor of Biomedical Informatics at Emory University,and as Associate Professor of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology from 2014 till 2019. He currently serves as Professor of Biomedical Informatics and Biomedical Engineering at Emory University and Georgia Institute of Technology. [1]
At Emory University,he was appointed as Interim Chair in 2016 and then as Chair of the Department of Biomedical Informatics since 2019.
Clifford's research focuses on four main themes.
Clifford has worked on scalable and affordable healthcare in low-resource settings. Most notably,he and his research team developed a novel method of identifying intrauterine growth restriction and gestational age estimation from a low-cost Doppler. [5] [6] In collaboration with Rachel Hall-Clifford,and the Maya Health Alliance,the team have developed a co-design program to deploy this AI-driven mHealth technology to improve outcomes in pregnancy and early childhood in Guatemala. [7] [8] [9] While on faculty at the University of Oxford he founded the Oxford Centre for Affordable Healthcare, [10] in which he along with his research team and collaborators developed a $5 mHealth blood pressure device, [11] a mobile stethoscope used in South Africa, [12] a cardiovascular disease screening system used in a clinical trial in India, [13] [14] and a smart hand-pump system for East Africa. [14]
Clifford is most well known for his contributions to the NIH-funded Research Resource for Complex Physiological Signals (known as PhysioNet) and his leadership of the associated PhysioNet Challenges/Moody PhysioNet Challenges since 2015, [15] [16] a series of annual international competition which has since 2000. [17] [18] [19] [20] [21] Clifford managed the coordination,assembly and dissemination of the MIMIC II database (through PhysioNet). [22] [23]
During his doctoral work at the University of Oxford,Clifford along with co-author Patrick McSharry,introduced a dynamical model which is based on three coupled ordinary differential equations,and is capable of generating realistic synthetic electrocardiogram (ECG) signals. [24] Later,while at MIT,Clifford collaborated with Christian Jutten and Reza Sameni to develop a novel approach to recording and extracting fetal ECG. [25] [26] [27] This work was licensed and spun out into a startup,Mindchild Medical Inc. He subsequently demonstrated that the approach could accurately extract important clinical parameters (QT intervals and ST-levels). [28]
While on faculty at the University of Oxford,Clifford established a program in Computational Neuro-psychiatry, [29] funded by the UK's Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, [30] and the Wellcome Trust, [31] to use passive data collected from mobile phones,and active data from body worn sensors to assess mental health status in schizophrenic and bipolar disorder patients. [32] [33] Later,he extended this program to use passive eye-tracking and emotion analysis from video to evaluate depression, [34] mild cognitive impairment, [35] and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. [36]
Electrocardiography is the process of producing an electrocardiogram,a recording of the heart's electrical activity through repeated cardiac cycles. It is an electrogram of the heart which is a graph of voltage versus time of the electrical activity of the heart using electrodes placed on the skin. These electrodes detect the small electrical changes that are a consequence of cardiac muscle depolarization followed by repolarization during each cardiac cycle (heartbeat). Changes in the normal ECG pattern occur in numerous cardiac abnormalities,including cardiac rhythm disturbances,inadequate coronary artery blood flow,and electrolyte disturbances.
Health informatics is the study and implementation of computer structures and algorithms to improve communication,understanding,and management of medical information. It can be view as branch of engineering and applied science.
The QRS complex is the combination of three of the graphical deflections seen on a typical electrocardiogram. It is usually the central and most visually obvious part of the tracing. It corresponds to the depolarization of the right and left ventricles of the heart and contraction of the large ventricular muscles.
Lionel Tarassenko,is a British engineer and academic,who is a leading expert in the application of signal processing and machine learning to healthcare. Tarassenko is President of Reuben College,Oxford.
Biomedical text mining refers to the methods and study of how text mining may be applied to texts and literature of the biomedical domain. As a field of research,biomedical text mining incorporates ideas from natural language processing,bioinformatics,medical informatics and computational linguistics. The strategies in this field have been applied to the biomedical literature available through services such as PubMed.
Neuroinformatics is the field that combines informatics and neuroscience. Neuroinformatics is related with neuroscience data and information processing by artificial neural networks. There are three main directions where neuroinformatics has to be applied:
Carole Anne Goble,is a British academic who is Professor of Computer Science at the University of Manchester. She is principal investigator (PI) of the myGrid,BioCatalogue and myExperiment projects and co-leads the Information Management Group (IMG) with Norman Paton.
Cardiac monitoring generally refers to continuous or intermittent monitoring of heart activity to assess a patient's condition relative to their cardiac rhythm. Cardiac monitoring is usually carried out using electrocardiography,which is a noninvasive process that records the heart's electrical activity and displays it in an electrocardiogram. It is different from hemodynamic monitoring,which monitors the pressure and flow of blood within the cardiovascular system. The two may be performed simultaneously on critical heart patients. Cardiac monitoring for ambulatory patients is known as ambulatory electrocardiography and uses a small,wearable device,such as a Holter monitor,wireless ambulatory ECG,or an implantable loop recorder. Data from a cardiac monitor can be transmitted to a distant monitoring station in a process known as telemetry or biotelemetry.
A phonocardiogram is a plot of high-fidelity recording of the sounds and murmurs made by the heart with the help of the machine called the phonocardiograph;thus,phonocardiography is the recording of all the sounds made by the heart during a cardiac cycle.
Christopher Ray Johnson is an American computer scientist. He is a distinguished professor of computer science at the University of Utah,and founding director of the Scientific Computing and Imaging Institute (SCI). His research interests are in the areas of scientific computing and scientific visualization.
Computer-aided auscultation (CAA),or computerized assisted auscultation,is a digital form of auscultation. It includes the recording,visualization,storage,analysis and sharing of digital recordings of heart or lung sounds. The recordings are obtained using an electronic stethoscope or similarly suitable recording device. Computer-aided auscultation is designed to assist health care professionals who perform auscultation as part of their diagnostic process. Commercial CAA products are usually classified as clinical decision support systems that support medical professionals in making a diagnosis. As such they are medical devices and require certification or approval from a competent authority.
In medicine,monitoring is the observation of a disease,condition or one or several medical parameters over time.
Sethuraman Panchanathan is an Indian–American computer scientist and academic administrator,and the 15th Director of National Science Foundation since June 2020.
Ary Louis Goldberger is a physician-educator,whose collaborative research work is at the interface of biomedicine and complexity science. He holds a BA from Harvard College and an MD from Yale Medical School. He did his clinical training in internal medicine and cardiovascular disease at Yale–New Haven Hospital and at the University of California,San Diego,respectively. He currently serves as Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and was one of the Core Founding Faculty (2010-2015) of the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University.
Ron Kikinis is an American physician and scientist best known for his research in the fields of imaging informatics,image guided surgery,and medical image computing. He is a professor of radiology at Harvard Medical School. Kikinis is the founding director of the Surgical Planning Laboratory in the Department of Radiology at Brigham and Women's Hospital,in Boston,Massachusetts. He is the vice-chair for Biomedical Informatics Research in the Department of Radiology.
Ümit V. Çatalyürek is a professor of computer science at the Georgia Institute of Technology,and Adjunct Professor in department of Biomedical Informatics at the Ohio State University. He is known for his work on graph analytics,parallel algorithms for scientific applications,data-intensive computing,and large scale genomic and biomedical applications. He was the director of the High Performance Computing Lab at the Ohio State University. He was named Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) in 2016 for contributions to combinatorial scientific computing and parallel computing.
The Pan–Tompkins algorithm is commonly used to detect QRS complexes in electrocardiographic signals (ECG). The QRS complex represents the ventricular depolarization and the main spike visible in an ECG signal. This feature makes it particularly suitable for measuring heart rate,the first way to assess the heart health state. In the first derivation of Einthoven of a physiological heart,the QRS complex is composed by a downward deflection,a high upward deflection and a final downward deflection.
Konstantina "Nantia" Nikita is a Greek electrical and computer engineer and a professor at the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the National Technical University of Athens (NTUA),Greece. She is director of the Mobile Radiocommunications Lab and founder and director of the Biomedical Simulations and Imaging Lab,NTUA. Since 2015,she has been an Irene McCulloch Distinguished Adjunct Professor of Biomedical Engineering and Medicine at Keck School of Medicine and Viterbi School of Engineering,University of Southern California.
May Dongmei Wang is a Chinese-American biomedical engineer whose research involves biomedical big data analytics,the interpretation and application of big data in medicine and biology,as generated from microarrays and quantum dots. She is a professor of biomedical engineering and Wallace H. Coulter Distinguished Faculty Fellow in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering,a joint program of Georgia Tech,Emory University,and Peking University.