Point-of-care ultrasound (POCUS) describes the process whereby any healthcare practitioner uses a portable ultrasound device to diagnose conditions at the bedside, whether in an urban hospital, rural clinic, or a remote location. When used appropriately, POCUS can reduce wait times for diagnostic tests, make patient treatment pathways more efficient, streamline transfers to save healthcare costs, and save lives. Although this technology is becoming cheaper and more portable, its use still remains significantly constrained by the high levels of training required by its operators to become proficient in interpretation and analysis. In this talk, I will summarize the journey our research team has taken to mobilize machine learning technologies in order to augment decision support for POCUS imaging in British Columbia, Canada. I will also present several case studies as future directions for research in machine learning in this domain.
Bio:
Purang Abolmaesumi received his BSc (1995) and MSc (1997) from Sharif University of Technology, Iran, and his PhD (2002) from UBC, all in Electrical Engineering. From 2002 to 2009, he was a faculty member with the School of Computing, Queen's University. He then joined the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at UBC, where he is a Professor, with Associate Memberships to Department of Urologic Sciences and School of Biomedical Engineering.
Dr. Abolmaesumi's internationally recognized research program investigates advanced topics in medical imaging, machine learning on data at scale, and image-guided diagnosis and interventions.
Dr. Abolmaesumi is a Distinguished University Scholar, and the recipient of the Killam Faculty Research Prize, the Killam Award for Excellence in Mentoring and the Killam Faculty Research Fellowship at UBC. He currently serves as an Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging and has served as an Associate Editor of the IEEE TBME between 2008 and 2012. He is a Board Member of the International Society for Computer Aided Surgery, and has served on the Program Committees of the Medical Image Computing and Computing and Computer-Assisted Intervention (MICCAI), International Society for Optics and Photonics (SPIE) Medical Imaging, and the International Conference on Information Processing in Computer-Assisted Interventions (IPCAI). Dr. Abolmaesumi served as the General Chair of IPCAI 2014 and 2015, and has served as Program Chair of IPCAI 2012 in Pisa and Workshop and Tutorial Chair of MICCAI 2011 and 2015. He also served as the Program Chair for MICCAI 2020, and local Chair for MICCAI 2023. Dr. Abolmaesumi is a member of the Royal Society of Canada, a Fellow of MICCAI, and a Fellow of the Canadian Academy of Engineering.