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Advancing Cancer Imaging

Joel Saltz, MD, of Biomedical Informatics Leads Cancer Imaging Archive Digital Pathology Effort with collaborative $8M NCI grant

Joel Saltz, MD, of Biomedical InformaticsThe National Cancer Institute (NCI) has awarded Joel Saltz, MD, together with a team of researchers from the University of Arkansas and Emory University, a $8M grant over the next five years to develop an integrated Radiology/Pathology/”omics” data repository that will enable team science research with the ultimate goal of developing ways of steering cancer treatment. This effort will develop and deploy tools to create large collections of well-curated data for algorithm testing and validation.

“Cancer is a complex multifactorial disease state and the ability to anticipate and steer treatment results will require information synthesis across multiple scales from the host to the molecular level,” said Dr. Saltz, vice president for clinical informatics and founder and Cherith chair of the Department of Biomedical Informatics, which is jointly administered by the College of Engineering and Applied Sciences and the School of Medicine, at Stony Brook University.

Dr. Saltz, who is also an associate director of the Stony Brook Cancer Center, is one of a team  of PIs on the project, and is leading the Pathology component.  This effort leverages Dr. Saltz other NCI funded efforts including the NCI project: “Tools to Analyze Morphology and Spatially Mapped Molecular Data”.  Dr. Saltz is a pioneer in the biomedical informatics field, which uses computational methods to extract meaning from large data sets. His ground-breaking work in digital image archiving systems for pathology images has led to the FDA’s approval of using digital surgical pathology slides for interpretations.

“Joel’s work and leadership of the Department of Biomedical Informatics is a tremendous example of the interdisciplinary research underway between engineering and medicine at Stony Brook University,” said Fotis Sotiropoulos, Dean of the College of Engineering and Applied Sciences. “We look forward to supporting Joel over the next five years, and the innovation his team will contribute to tracking and fighting cancer.”

Dr. Saltz founded and built two highly successful departments of biomedical informatics, one at Ohio State University and one at Emory University.  In 2013, he joined Stony Brook as Vice President for Clinical Informatics and Founding Department Chair of Biomedical Informatics – to create a living laboratory for biomedical informatics and to create a third unique biomedical informatics department dually housed in the Stony Brook School of Medicine and the College of Engineering and Applied Sciences.