AIMI+IBIIS Seminar: Infrastructure for Machine Learning and AI Research: Lessons Learned from Pittsburgh (Michael Becich, MD, PhD)

Speaker(s): 

Michael Becich, MD, PhD

Abstract:
The University of Pittsburgh Department of Biomedical Informatics (DBMI) seeks to unlock the potential of machine learning and artificial intelligence for healthcare by building pipelines of high impact data from pathology imaging. This seminar will describe the experience of the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine and UPMC (our health system partner) in creating large scale data to enable the use of AI in personalized medicine and immunotherapy with a focus on immuno-oncology. The lessons learned from DBMI’s experience with the NCI’s Information Technology for Cancer Research (ICTR) program with the Text Information Extraction System (TIES) Cancer Research Network (TCRN) will be featured.

The objectives are:
1) To understand the Text Information System (TIES) Cancer Research Network (TCRN)
2) To understand Whole Slide Imaging (WSI) and Computational Pathology (Comp Path)
3) To understand the role of clinical informatics and the cancer registry in enabling Pathology Imaging Infrastructure Enabled by TCRN
4) To understand Computational Pathology's role in Predictive Analytics for Precision Oncology and how this leads to better health and discovery science

About:
Dr. Michael J. Becich is a Distinguished University Professor of Biomedical Informatics and the founding chair of the Department of Biomedical Informatics at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. He is jointly appointed as Professor of Pathology, Computing & Information and Clinical & Translational Sciences. He currently serves as the Associate Vice-Chancellor for Informatics for the Health Sciences at Pitt.

Dr. Becich is an MD PhD in Experimental Pathology from Northwestern University and trained in surgical pathology at Washington University. His research interests are in cancer biology and biomedical/pathology informatics. Currently, he focuses on developing data commons to integrate clinical, imaging and -omic data to biorepositories to enable AI/machine learning based discovery and translational science. He leads the in NCI ITCR Text Information Extraction System (TIES) Cancer Research Network (TCRN) and is Associate Director of the UPMC Hillman Cancer Institute. He is also Associate Director of the University of Pittsburgh’s Clinical and Translational Science Institute.

He was a founder of two startups, Tissue Informatics and InterScope Technologies (formerly Trestle Corp.), which were merged into Clinical Data and Zeiss. He was Scientific Advisory Board member of Omnyx, a GE and UPMC joint venture which was recently acquired by Inspirata, Inc. He is currently co-founder of new startup company, SpIntellx, Inc. Finally, he is co-director of the Center for Commercial Applications (CCA) of Healthcare Data that is part of the Pittsburgh Health Data Alliance.

Dr. Becich is an avid supporter of computational pathology applied to clinical and research issues in translational medicine. He is a member of 13 professional societies and has published more than 150 papers that contribute to the mission of biomedical and pathology informatics as applied to translational medicine. Dr. Becich help found the Pathology Informatics Summit in 1996, which has provided more than 350 educational awards to trainees in informatics. He also helped found the Association for Pathology Informatics (API) in 2000 and his department helps to support the Journal of Pathology Informatics, that was launched in 2010.