Looking back: New Frontiers Symposium 2018 - day 1 Big data, better healthcare?

Guest speakers and content

Leonard D'Avolio (CYFT and Harvard)

Tapping into the potential of health data for better health
Leonard D’Avolio, Ph.D. has experience working with government, academia, philanthropy, and industry to make the learning healthcare system a reality. He’s the co-founder of Cyft, an organization that uses data and AI to improve clinical care and operations. He is also an Assistant Professor at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School, an advisor to the Helmsley Charitable Trust Foundation and several healthcare startups, and a board member for Youth Development Organization. He helped improve childbirth across 70 clinics in India working with Dr. Atul Gawande at Ariadne Labs, created the infrastructure for the world’s largest genomic medicine cohort, and embedded the first clinical trial within an electronic medical record system for the Dept. of Veterans Affairs. His work has been funded by the National Cancer Institute, Department of Veterans Affairs, Department of Defense, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, National Library of Medicine, and the Helmsley Charitable Trust Foundation.

Jeroen van der Laak (Radboudumc)

Using deep learning strategies to improve diagnosis
Jeroen van der Laak is associate professor in computational Pathology at the Department of Pathology of the Radboud University Medical Center in Nijmegen, The Netherlands and guest professor at the Center for Medical Image Science and Visualization (CMIV) in Linkoping, Sweden. His research focuses on the use machine learning for the analysis of whole slide images. Application areas include: improvement of routine pathology diagnostics, objective quantification of immunohistochemical markers, and study of novel imaging biomarkers for prognostics. Dr van der Laak has an MSc in computer science and acquired his PhD from the Radboud University in Nijmegen. He co-authored over 90 peer-reviewed publications and is member of the editorial boards of Laboratory Investigation and the Journal of Pathology Informatics. He is member of the board of directors of the Digital Pathology Association and organizer of sessions at the European Congress of Pathology and the Pathology Visions conference. He coordinated the highly successful CAMELYON grand challenges in 2016 and 2017. Dr van der Laak acquired research grants from the European Union and the Dutch Cancer Society, among others. He is frequently invited as a speaker at international conferences.

Brian Bot (Sage BioNetworks)

Biomedical research in an increasingly digital world
Brian Bot is Principal Scientist and Head of Outreach and Strategic Development at Sage Bionetworks in Seattle, WA USA. Brian's interests lie at the intersection of biomedical research, technology, and policy. Brian was recently named by Mozilla as one of “50 People Who Are Making the Internet a Better Place.” His current work aims to make the biomedical research system more effective by challenging the traditional roles of researchers, institutions, funders, and research participants. At its heart, this work is rooted in building trust between these parties as well as with the public at large.

Johan Bollen (Indiana University Bloomington)

Using social networking data to model public health and well-being
Johan Bollen is a professor at the Indiana University School of Informatics and Computing. He was formerly a staff scientist at the Los Alamos National Laboratory from 2005-2009, and an Assistant Professor at the Department of Computer Science of Old Dominion University from 2002 to 2005. He obtained his PhD in Experimental Psychology from the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB) in 2001. He has published more than 75 articles on computational social science, social media analytics, informetrics, and digital libraries. His research has been funded by the NSF, DARPA, IARPA, EDA, NASA, and Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Johan lives in Bloomington, Indiana with his wife and daughter.

Robert Stewart (King’s College, Londen)

Mental healthcare data science: the CRIS experience
Rob Stewart is Professor of Psychiatric Epidemiology and Clinical Informatics at King’s College London Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience (IoPPN). He also works as a Consultant in Liaison Old Age Psychiatry at the South London and Maudsley NHS Trust (SLaM). Prof. Stewart joined IoPPN in 1996 as a junior clinical researcher and has developed specialist interests in the epidemiology of late life mental disorders, international mental health and, more recently, clinical informatics. He has been academic lead for the Clinical Record Interactive Search (CRIS) data resource at SLaM since its development in 2007 – a platform allowing the research use of anonymised electronic mental health records for over 400,000 SLaM patients, supplemented over the years with a range of data linkages and natural language processing algorithms. CRIS has supported over 120 research papers to date and an extensive portfolio of projects across all mental healthcare specialties, as well as being set up as a data resource to a number of other mental health services.

Alessandro Vespignani (MOBS-lab, Northeastern University)

Data Science and Epidemiology: more than forecast
Alessandro Vespignani is the Sternberg Family Distinguished University professor at Northeastern University. He is the founding director of the Network Science Institute and lead the Laboratory for the Modeling of Biological and Socio-technical Systems. Vespignani’s recent work focuses on data-driven computational modeling and forecast of emerging infectious diseases; resilience of complex networks; and collective behavior of techno-social systems. Vespignani is elected fellow of the American Physical Society, member of the Academy of Europe, and fellow of the Institute for Quantitative Social Sciences at Harvard University. He served in the board/leadership of a variety of professional association, journals and the Institute for Scientific Interchange Foundation.

Bram van Ginneken (Radboudumc)

Integrating and putting the possibilities into perspective
Bram van Ginneken is Professor of Functional Image Analysis at Radboud University Nijmegen Medical Centre. Since 2010, he is co-chair of the Diagnostic Image Analysis Group within the Department of Radiology and Nuclear Medicine, together with Nico Karssemeijer. He also works for Fraunhofer MEVIS in Bremen, Germany, and is one of the founders of Thirona a company that provides quantitative analysis of chest CT scans. Bram studied Physics at the Eindhoven University of Technology and at Utrecht University. In March 2001, he obtained his Ph.D. at the Image Sciences Institute (ISI) on Computer-Aided Diagnosis in Chest Radiography. From 2001 through 2009 he led the Computer-Aided Diagnosis group at ISI, where he still is has an Associated Faculty position. He has (co-)authored over 100 publications in international journals. He is Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Medical imaging and member of the Editorial Board of Medical Image Analysis. He has pioneerd the concept of challenges in medical analysis.

Peter Sloot (University of Amsterdam/ Complexity Institute in NTU, Singapore)

The Complexity of Health and Diseases: Concerns and Consequences of focusing only on Big Data and AI
Prof. Peter M.A. Sloot (MSc Chemical Physics UvA; PhD Dutch Cancer Institute) is research professor at the University of Amsterdam and a full professor and director of the Complexity Institute in NTU, Singapore. He is a laureate of the Russian Leading Scientist president’s program (2010) and received a Russian Federation Mega Grant (3.6 MEuro) for his study on novel computational models. He has been the PI of many international research programs on complex systems, like ViroLab and DynaNets. He is editor-in-chief of two highly ranked Elsevier Science journals. Prof. Sloot was the promotor of 52 PhD theses and has published over 450 research papers. His main interest is in understanding causality in complex adaptive systems, with particular application to health and biomedicine. His work is covered in international media such as newspapers, TV interviews and documentaries. Since 2016 he leads the ambitious Institute of Advanced Study of the UvA.  Click here for more details. 

Tamar Sharon (Maastricht University)

Bigger data, better healthcare, broader ethical challenges
Tamar Sharon is an assistant professor in the philosophy department and Science & Technology Studies group at Maastricht University, The Netherlands. Her research explores the societal and ethical impacts of new and emerging technologies in a context of shifting understandings of health, citizenship and participation. She has published on human enhancement (Human Nature in an Age of Biotechnology, 2014), self-tracking for health, and the political economy of personal health data sharing. She has received various research grants and prizes for her research, including the Mara Bellar Prize (IL), the Edmond Hustinx Prize for Science (NL), and the Netherlands Organisation for Science "Rubicon" and "VENI" grants. She is a member of the Maastricht Young Academy, the Institute for Data Science (Maastricht) and the Data and Information Technologies in Health and Medicine Lab at King’s College London, where she has also been a Visiting Fellow.

Debate with speakers and principal clinicians

How will healthcare data science benefit the caring relationship?
Each speaker will be asked to end talk with provocative statement that the audience can vote on during the day (and discuss on twitter/social media!). So ideally, the votes are visible during the day.

Program New Frontiers symposium 1 November

• what is the potential promise of big data application to healthcare;
• what are examples of successful application of data science;
• what are the technical, organizational, ethical and epistemological limitations of the application of data science in the field of health;
• and will big data help to bridge the divide between medicine-as-a-science and medicine-as-an-art, and improve the individual patient journey?

THURSDAY 1 NOVEMBER 2018