Georgia Tourassi

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

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

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Oak Ridge National Laboratory</span> United States DOE national laboratory in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, United States

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.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">United States Department of Energy National Laboratories</span> Laboratories owned by the United States Department of Energy

The United States Department of Energy National Laboratories and Technology Centers is a system of laboratories overseen by the United States Department of Energy (DOE) for scientific and technological research. The primary mission of the DOE national laboratories is to conduct research and development (R&D) addressing national priorities: energy and climate, the environment, national security, and health. Sixteen of the seventeen DOE national laboratories are federally funded research and development centers administered, managed, operated and staffed by private-sector organizations under management and operating (M&O) contracts with the DOE.

Oak Ridge Associated Universities (ORAU) is a consortium of American universities headquartered in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, with offices in Arvada, Colorado, Cincinnati, Ohio, and staff at other locations across the country.

Jeremy Christopher Smith is a British-born computational molecular biophysicist.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Karl Z. Morgan</span>

Karl Ziegler Morgan, was an American physicist who was one of the founders of the field of radiation health physics. He was director of health physics at Oak Ridge National Laboratory from the time in the Manhattan Project late 1940s until his retirement in 1972.

The National Center for Computational Sciences (NCCS) is a United States Department of Energy (DOE) Leadership Computing Facility that houses the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF), a DOE Office of Science User Facility charged with helping researchers solve challenging scientific problems of global interest with a combination of leading high-performance computing (HPC) resources and international expertise in scientific computing.

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Titan (supercomputer)</span> American supercomputer

Titan or OLCF-3 was a supercomputer built by Cray at Oak Ridge National Laboratory for use in a variety of science projects. Titan was an upgrade of Jaguar, a previous supercomputer at Oak Ridge, that uses graphics processing units (GPUs) in addition to conventional central processing units (CPUs). Titan was the first such hybrid to perform over 10 petaFLOPS. The upgrade began in October 2011, commenced stability testing in October 2012 and it became available to researchers in early 2013. The initial cost of the upgrade was US$60 million, funded primarily by the United States Department of Energy.

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Consortium for the Advanced Simulation of Light Water Reactors (CASL) is an Energy Innovation Hub sponsored by United States Department of Energy (DOE) and based at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL). CASL combines fundamental research and technology development through an integrated partnership of government, academia, and industry that extends across the nuclear energy enterprise. The goal of CASL is to develop advanced computational models of light water reactors (LWRs) that can be used by utilities, fuel vendors, universities, and national laboratories to help improve the performance of existing and future nuclear reactors. CASL was created in May 2010, and was the first energy innovation hub to be awarded.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Summit (supercomputer)</span> Supercomputer developed by IBM

Summit or OLCF-4 is a supercomputer developed by IBM for use at Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF), a facility at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, capable of 200 petaFLOPS thus making it the 5th fastest supercomputer in the world after Frontier (OLCF-5), Fugaku, LUMI, and Leonardo, with Frontier being the fastest. It held the number 1 position from November 2018 to June 2020. Its current LINPACK benchmark is clocked at 148.6 petaFLOPS.

The Institute for Functional Imaging of Materials (IFIM) is an organization set up in 2014, within the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) situated in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, USA. The goal of the institute is to provide a bridge between modeling and applied mathematics and imaging data collected from various forms of microscopy available at ORNL. The current director of the IFIM is Sergei Kalinin who was awarded the Medal for Scanning Probe Microscopy by the Royal Microscopical Society. The institute supports President Obama's Materials Genome Initiative.

Maryellen L. Giger, is an American physicist and radiologist who has made significant contributions to the field of medical imaging.

Mia K. Markey is an American biomedical engineer and an Engineering Foundation Endowed Faculty Fellow in Engineering at University of Texas at Austin and at the MD Anderson Cancer Center. Her research focus is on sex differences and the effects they leave on medical practices, including the psychosocial adjustment women who undergo mastectomies for breast cancer in order to improve their mental and physical well being.

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Nirmala "Nimmi" Ramanujam is the Robert W. Carr Professor of Biomedical Engineering, and a faculty member in the Global Health Institute and the Department of Pharmacology & Cell Biology at Duke University. She is the director of the Center of Global Women's Health Technologies (GWHT) and founder of Zenalux Biomedical Inc. and Calla Health. Ramanujam has spent the last two decades developing precision diagnostics and more recently precision therapeutics for breast and cervical cancer, with a focus on addressing global health disparities. She has more than 20 patents and over 150 publications for screening, diagnostic, and surgical applications, and has raised over $30M of funding to pursue these innovations through a variety of funding mechanisms, including NIH R01s and R21s, NIH Bioengineering Partnerships, NCI Academic Industry Partnerships, NIH Small Business grants and USAID funding. As the founding director of the Center for Global Women's Health Technologies at Duke University, she has developed a consortium of over 50+ partners including international academic institutions and hospitals, non-governmental organizations, ministries of health, and commercial partners; this consortium is working to ensure that the technologies developed at the center are adopted by cancer control programs in geographically and economically diverse healthcare settings.

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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.