Georgia Tourassi

Last updated
Gina Tourassi
Gina Tourassi at ORNL.jpg
Tourassi at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in 2017
Born
Georgia D. Tourassi

Greece
Alma mater Duke University (PhD)
Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (BSc)
Scientific career
Fields Biomedical informatics
Computer-aided diagnosis
Artificial intelligence [1]
Institutions Duke University
Oak Ridge National Laboratory
Thesis Artificial neural networks for image analysis and diagnosis in nuclear medicine  (1993)
Website www.ornl.gov/staff-profile/georgia-tourassi

Georgia "Gina" D. Tourassi is the Director of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory health data sciences institute [1] and adjunct Professor of radiology at Duke University. She works on biomedical informatics, computer-aided diagnosis and artificial intelligence (AI) in health care. [1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Contents

Early life and education

Tourassi studied physics at Aristotle University of Thessaloniki and graduated in 1987. [6] She moved to Duke University for her doctoral studies, and earned a PhD in 1993. [7] [8]

Research and career

In 1988, Tourassi was appointed a postdoctoral research assistant at Duke University and promoted to associate professor of medical physics at Duke University Medical Center in 2006. Her research was supported by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Whitaker Foundation. Her work uses big health data, in particular for epidemiology of cancer. This includes the use of artificial intelligence in nuclear medicine, as well as computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) in breast cancer screening. [9] Her CAD systems is interactive, knowledge based and uses information theory. She has also developed indexing systems to speed-up image analysis, techniques to monitor the reliability of CAD and advanced computational intelligence techniques, including genetic algorithms. [9] Her knowledge-based approach uses image entropy to sort through hundreds of medical images, identifies the ones that are most informative and flag cancer indicators. [10] Tourassi was elected a member of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) advisory committee on computer-aided diagnosis (CAD). [11]

Tourassi joined Oak Ridge National Laboratory in 2011. [6] She is the Founding Director of the Health Data Sciences Institute, where she manages the strategic agenda of the biomedical science and computing group. [6] She has hosted a range of biomedical research conferences at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Tourassi is interested in automated tools to extract and process data for cancer surveillance. The Oak Ridge National Laboratory is home to the Titan supercomputer which is used for deep learning to automate the extraction of information from cancer pathology reports as part of Cancer Moonshot 2020. [12] [13] Tourassi predicts that automated data tools will permit medical researchers and policy makers to identify overlooked cancer research, as well as investing in promising technology. [12] She uses artificial intelligence to avoid context bias in interpretation of mammograms. [14] [15] [16]

Tourassi developed a user-oriented web crawler, iCrawl, that collects online content for e-health research. [17] She also worked on Oak Ridge Graph Analytics for Medical Innovation (ORiGAMI), a data tool to help diagnostics and research. [18] Tourassi used ORiGAMI to explore literature related to genomics. [18] She was part of a team that developed a knowledge graph that allows extraction of meaningful information from unstructured data. [19] Similar to the recommendation approaches of Netflix, Tourassi's tool combines large-scale graph analytics with machine learning.

Tourassi is an advocate for women and minorities in science and engineering. She is involved with the Oak Ridge National Laboratory women's mentorship program. [6] She is a member of The Bredesen Centre. [20]

Awards and honours

Related Research Articles

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Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) is a federally funded research and development center in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, United States. Founded in 1943, the laboratory is now sponsored by the United States Department of Energy and administered by UT–Battelle, LLC.

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References

  1. 1 2 3 Georgia Tourassi publications indexed by Google Scholar OOjs UI icon edit-ltr-progressive.svg
  2. ↑ Georgia Tourassi publications from Europe PubMed Central
  3. ↑ Tourassi, Georgia (2008). "Training neural network classifiers for medical decision making: The effects of imbalanced datasets on classification performance". Neural Networks. 21 (2–3): 427–436. doi:10.1016/j.neunet.2007.12.031. PMC   2346433 . PMID   18272329.
  4. ↑ Tourassi, Georgia (2001). "Application of the mutual information criterion for feature selection in computer-aided diagnosis". Medical Physics. 28 (12): 2394–2402. Bibcode:2001MedPh..28.2394T. doi:10.1118/1.1418724. PMID   11797941.
  5. ↑ Tourassi, Georgia (2003). "Computer-assisted detection of mammographic masses: A template matching scheme based on mutual information". Medical Physics. 30 (8): 2123–2130. Bibcode:2003MedPh..30.2123T. doi:10.1118/1.1589494. PMID   12945977.
  6. 1 2 3 4 5 "Georgia Tourassi | ORNL". Ornl.gov. Retrieved 2019-06-24.
  7. ↑ Tourassi, Georgia D. (1993). Artificial neural networks for image analysis and diagnosis in nuclear medicine (PhD thesis). OCLC   29201624. ProQuest   304049219.
  8. ↑ "CURRICULUM VITAE GEORGIA D. TOURASSI, PHD" (PDF). Docplayer.net. Retrieved 25 June 2019.
  9. 1 2 "Georgia D. Tourassi | Scholars@Duke". Scholars.duke.edu. Retrieved 2019-06-24.
  10. ↑ Greene, Kate. "A Faster Second Opinion". MIT Technology Review. Retrieved 2019-06-24.
  11. ↑ "CESG Seminar: Health Data Sciences at ORNL: From Personalized Medicine to Population Health". Cesg.tamu.edu. Retrieved 2019-06-24.
  12. 1 2 Gagliordi, Natalie. "Titan supercomputer tests new deep learning methods for cancer research". ZDNet. Retrieved 2019-06-24.
  13. ↑ Siner, Emily (10 June 2018). "How A Tennessee Supercomputer, Now The World's Fastest, Might Find New Cures For Cancer". Nashvillepublicradio.org. Retrieved 2019-06-24.
  14. ↑ "Group uses AI to assess mammo interpretation bias". AuntMinnie.com. Retrieved 2019-06-24.
  15. ↑ Brock, Anne. "ORNL's Titan supercomputer helps sharpen breast cancer detection". Wvlt.tv. Retrieved 2019-06-24.
  16. ↑ "Lab uses eye-tracking device, AI to study impact of contextual bias on radiologists interpreting mammograms". Radiology Business. Retrieved 2019-06-24.
  17. ↑ Xu, Songhua; Yoon, Hong-Jun; Tourassi, Georgia (2013). "A user-oriented web crawler for selectively acquiring online content in e-health research". Bioinformatics. 30 (1): 104–114. doi:10.1093/bioinformatics/btt571. ISSN   1460-2059. PMC   3866553 . PMID   24078710.
  18. 1 2 "A cure for medical researchers' big data headache". Phys.org. Retrieved 2019-06-24.
  19. ↑ "New ORNL AI tool revolutionizes process for matching cancer patients with clinical trials". EurekAlert!. Retrieved 2019-06-24.
  20. ↑ "Gina Tourassi | The Bredesen Center". Bredesencenter.utk.edu. Retrieved 2019-06-24.
  21. ↑ "Georgia Tourassi Georgia D. Tourassi, Ph.D. To be Inducted into Medical and Biological Engineering Elite - AIMBE" . Retrieved 2019-06-24.
  22. ↑ "Medical Physics : Vol 36, No 5". Medical Physics. 36 (5). 2009. doi:10.1002/mp.2009.36.issue-5. ISSN   0094-2405.
  23. ↑ "HPCwire awards Lab scientists at SC17". Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. 2017-11-16. Retrieved 2019-06-24.
  24. ↑ "Tourassi elected fellow of International Society for Optics and Photonics | ORNL". Ornl.gov. Retrieved 2019-06-24.
  25. 1 2 "Georgia Tourassi of Oak Ridge National Laboratory's Computing and Computational Sciences Directorate has received the ORNL Director's Award for Outstanding Individual Accomplishment in Science and Technology". Newswise.com. Retrieved 2019-06-24.
  26. ↑ "SPIE Medical Imaging Highlights | Photos and more". Spie.org. Retrieved 2019-06-24.
  27. ↑ "Invitation from Chairs | SPIE Medical Imaging". Spie.org. Retrieved 2019-06-24.
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