Meet our Speakers

Alexander Biliby is an Assistant Professor and Director of the Augmented Precision Medicine Lab at the University of Toronto. He's interested in leveraging modern machine learning techniques to appropriately risk stratify patients to maximize patient outcomes. More specifically, in applying these techniques to cancer, cardiac, and dementia patients. 

Michael Burdno is a Computer Scientist specializing in the use of Computational methods for the analysis of Medical data, working as a Professor at the University of Toronto and the Chief Data Scientist for the University Health Network, leading the DATA Team. He is also a faculty member at the Vector Institute for Artificial Intelligence and the Scientific Director of HPC4Health, a private computing cloud for Ontario hospitals.

Crizza Ching Crizza is a PhD candidate in the Institute of Medical Science at the University of Toronto. She is supervised by Drs. Jason Fish and Dinesh Thavendiranathan at the Toronto General Hospital Research Institute. Crizza's research focuses on characterizing the role of the vasculature in the pathogenesis of chemotherapy-related cardiac dysfunction.

Joseph Choi is the chief medical officer and chief operating officer of Hypercare, and is practicing emergency physician at the University Health Network. He is also an Assistant Professor at the University of Toronto with main interests in healthcare systems, quality improvement and innovation.

Ben Fine is a Radiologist at Trillium Health Partners and the Quality and Informatics Physician Lead for Diagnostic Imaging. His research and quality interests revolve around artificial intelligence and machine learning, diagnostic wait times, closed loop critical result notification, error-proofing, capacity prediction and other topics

Jeff Jaskolka is an interventional radiologist and Adjunct Professor at the University of Toronto interested in imaging and treatment of peripheral vascular disease. He conducts research in AI/NLP and in particular, using these tools to facilitate knowledge extraction from unstructured radiology reports for research and quality improvement initiatives.

April Khademi is Canada Research Chair in AI for Medical Imaging, Associate Professor of Biomedical Engineering at Toronto Metropolitan University and Principle Investigator of the Image Analysis in Medicine Lab (IAMLAB).  April’s research focuses on the design, development and deployment of AI algorithms for medical imaging. She is a licensed Professional Engineer in Ontario and has academic appointments at Vector Institute, UofT Medical Imaging and IMS.

Chris McIntosh is a Scientist at the Techna Institute, the Peter Munk Cardiac Centre, and the Joint Department of Medical Imaging, at the University Health Network, an Assistant Professor at the University of Toronto, and a Faculty Affiliate of the Vector Institute. His lab focuses on the theory and clinical application of AI in medicine for improving patient care including transfer learning, meta learning, computer vision, and explainable AI.

Valentin Secades has 26+ years experience in the IT services sector, 17 of those spent implementing Web, mobile, firmware and IoT solutions and related technology. He is an MSc candidate in Embedded Systems at El Tecnológico de Costa Rica, with the purpose of improving upon the last tier of deliverables which have to do with systems oriented towards embedded device hardware, as well as cognitive machine learning algorithms for smart devices.

Gabriel Solana-Lavalle earned his PhD in Smart Systems from the Universidad de las Américas Puebla (México). His research interests encompass signal processing, medical imaging analysis, forecasting, and machine learning. In 2022, he was an international visiting graduate student at the Institute of Medical Science, University of Toronto. He is currently working in industry on projects aimed at developing and implementing innovative technologies in signal processing for medical imaging.

Kowsar Teymouri Kowsar is a PhD Candidate at the Institute of Medical Science at the University of Toronto. She is supervised by Dr. James Kennedy at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health. She studies the genetics of schizophrenia to better understand the role of the immune system in its pathophysiology.

Pascal Tyrrell is an accomplished data scientist and the Director of Data Science at the University of Toronto's Department of Medical Imaging, within the Temerty Faculty of Medicine. As an Associate Professor, he founded the MiDATA data science program. He also holds appointments in the Institute of Medical Science, where he serves as Director of Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion, and in the Department of Statistical Sciences. His research focuses on applying cutting-edge Artificial Intelligence to medical image analysis, driving improved health outcomes. Additionally, Pascal is a serial entrepreneur with expertise in computer software, medical devices, and agri-tech.