I AM AN EMORY RESEARCHER (COPY) (COPY)
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Keeping Innovation and Empathy in AI Health Care
A PERSONAL TRAGEDY helped shape the career of Anant Madabhushi, who grew up in Chennai in Southern India. In India in the 1990s, he says, good students were encouraged to pursue either medicine or engineering. “But my heart was at the intersection of technology, engineering and health/medicine,” he says.
He discovered an undergraduate program in biomedical engineering. Then, “a very dear aunt of mine lost her life to breast cancer,” he says. “I realized that was one of those inflection points in my formative years. I decided I had a responsibility to use my training to do something about cancer and to have an impact on people’s lives.”
Madabhushi, now a professor of biomedical engineering at Emory and Georgia Tech and director of the Emory Empathetic AI for Health (Health.AI) Institute, continued his training and education in biomedical engineering at the University of Texas at Austin, where he earned a master’s degree.
During his PhD program at the University of Pennsylvania, he experienced his second inflection point. “I had the good fortune of meeting a couple of pathologists who introduced me to the area of digital pathology,” he says.
Madabhushi says pathology had made similar leaps in the 17th century, when Antonie van Leeuwenhoek improved microscopes, using them to study microbes and blood cells, and again in the 19th century, when Rudolph Virchow advanced the concept that disease could be diagnosed by examining cells.
“That concept has persisted, that pathologists look at microbes, tissues, biopsies under a microscope to make a diagnosis. Now, though, we can create high-resolution digital images and apply AI algorithms to analyze them.”
Despite those types of advances, Madabushi doesn’t believe AI advancements will put radiologists or pathologists out of work.
“There’s a lot of anxiety among our trainees and attendings about the future with AI, but here we are, we still have a paucity of radiology and pathology expertise, even at Emory,” he says. “I do think we need to acknowledge that technology is going to have an impact. It means radiologists and pathologists will fundamentally need to rethink how they practice and render diagnoses with this new armory of powerful technologies.”
Redirection Towards Precision Medicine
When starting his lab at Rutger’s University, Madabhushi remembers developing algorithms for the grading of breast and prostate cancer.
“I showed a breast oncologist these decision-support tools for helping determine the grade of cancers, and he said, ‘What you’re doing is fabulous, but I have to be candid, it’s useless to me. As a clinician, I treat breast cancer patients. And the No. 1 thing I need to figure out is who should be treated more aggressively, with treatments like chemotherapy, and who could potentially avoid these treatments.’ “
Madabhushi realized that the inability to find the right treatments for his aunt’s breast cancer had resulted in her death. “I was helping the pathologists but not the patients,” he says.
He decided to pivot his work to focus on precision medicine, using technologies like AI with routine data like radiology and digital pathology scans to address these questions of who could benefit from which treatments.
Madabhushi, his 13-year-old son, Advait, and spouse, Annapurna Valluri, chief financial officer of the Cleveland Museum of Art, enjoy engaging in outside activities.
Madabhushi, his 13-year-old son, Advait, and spouse, Annapurna Valluri, chief financial officer of the Cleveland Museum of Art, enjoy engaging in outside activities.
Advancing AI in Health Care
This has served him well as director of Emory’s Empathetic AI for Health Institute. The modifier of “empathetic” was deliberately added to emphasize that the focus would be on applying these technological advances to people around the world with less resources and making the next evolution of health care accessible to all.
“As an immigrant from a lower-middle-income country, I am passionate about trying to have an impact on global health, and to develop health technologies that are affordable,” he says. “But we also have to look in our own backyard. In the U.S., we have a lot of inequity and health disparity.”
For example, Madabhushi points to rural populations that are not getting the same kinds of treatments or access to technologies someone in an urban setting or at an academic medical center.
Madabhushi says AI-supported personalized, precision medicine could help combat the financial toxicity of disease. (A study published in The American Journal of Medicine found that 42% of cancer patients over age 50 deplete their entire life savings within two years of their diagnosis.) “Part of my focus is to think about how to modulate the right treatment strategy for each patient, with the maximum likelihood of favorable response,” he says.
“It’s an amazing ecosystem for our research enterprise, in this beautiful building where you can cross the street and interact with oncologists, radiologists, pathologists and cardiologists — it results in a great deal of synergy,” he says. “My trainees are so grateful to have access to all this clinical expertise. As we talk about convergence and team science, that’s the recipe you need.”
Madabhushi, who is also a research career scientist with the Atlanta VA Medical Center, says AI must be used ethically to develop more equitable health care for all, which is why the Emory Empathetic AI for Health Institute was launched.
“Why use the word ‘empathetic’ in the name?” he says. “We want to develop AI tools that improve health care and medicine, but we want to do it in a way that isn’t going to leave any group or population behind.”
Anant Madabhushi collaborates with other faculty associated with Emory AI.Health to improve the detection, diagnosis, prognosis and prediction of treatment for multiple types of cancer, diabetes, kidney disease, and other illnesses. Left to right: Madabhushi, Judy Gichoya, Marly van Assen and Gari Clifford.
Anant Madabhushi collaborates with other faculty associated with Emory AI.Health to improve the detection, diagnosis, prognosis and prediction of treatment for multiple types of cancer, diabetes, kidney disease, and other illnesses. Left to right: Madabhushi, Judy Gichoya, Marly van Assen and Gari Clifford.
The Madabhushi team has already achieved significant translational success, including 200-plus awarded or pending patents, three spin-off companies, and 40 technologies licensed. Georgia Trend magazine recently named Madabhushi to its list of 500 Most Influential Leaders as part of its Technology and Research portfolio.The Madabhushi team has already achieved significant translational success, including 200-plus awarded or pending patents, three spin-off companies, and 40 technologies licensed. Georgia Trend magazine recently named Madabhushi to its list of 500 Most Influential Leaders as part of its Technology and Research portfolio.
The mission of AI.Health is to innovate, deploy and scale.
“It’s not just about the technology,” he says. “It’s about developing on-the-ground collaborations and getting these diagnostic tools to those who can benefit the most, whether in Tanzania or rural Georgia.”
As seen in Emory Health Digest.
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