13 People Who Are Making the Difference in AI Healthcare

The adoption of AI in healthcare has opened the door to immense possibilities not only in terms of disease diagnosis and prediction but also in drug discovery and development, robotic-assisted surgery, clinical trial research, predictive resource allocation, and many more. The computational algorithm of artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI-ML) helps the healthcare industry analyze enormous volumes of health data for records and clinical studies to suggest better diagnosis and treatment. 

The application of AI in healthcare is not just improving the efficiency and accuracy of medical services; it’s also paving the way for innovations that were previously unimaginable, ultimately aiming to enhance patient outcomes and the overall healthcare experience. 

According to Statista, the artificial intelligence (AI) healthcare market was valued at $11 billion in 2021 and is projected to be worth $187 billion in 2030. That massive increase will bring considerable changes in how medical providers, hospitals, pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies, and others in the healthcare industry operate. Read the Statista Report: Artificial intelligence (AI) in healthcare market size worldwide from 2021 to 2030

Also read: AI in Healthcare [2024]: Benefits, Future, Examples, and More

AI Healthcare: Top 10 Ways AI ML Reshaping Health and Patient Care

1. Disease Diagnosis and Prediction: AI algorithms are used to diagnose diseases more accurately and quickly than traditional methods. For instance, AI in radiology is being employed to read X-rays and MRI scans, identifying abnormalities such as tumours and fractures with high accuracy
2. Personalized Medicine: AI helps in analyzing data from various sources, including genetic information, to personalize treatment plans for patients.
3. Drug Discovery and Development: AI helps speed up the drug discovery process by analyzing vast datasets to predict drug formulations and use cases.
4. Robot-Assisted Surgery: AI-driven robots are used in surgeries for precise control, often leading to less invasive procedures, reduced recovery times, and improved outcomes.
5. Healthcare Administration: AI is streamlining administrative tasks in healthcare, such as scheduling appointments, managing patients’ records, and processing insurance claims.
6. Telemedicine and Remote Monitoring: AI-capable telemedicine platforms are enabling remote diagnosis and monitoring of patients, which benefits people living in remote locations
7. Clinical Trial Research: AI is used in clinical trials to analyze data and help researchers conclude faster. It can also help in identifying suitable candidates for clinical trials, thereby improving the efficiency and effectiveness of research studies.
8. Enhancing Patient Experience: AI chatbots and virtual health assistants provide patients with instant responses to their health-related queries, improving patient engagement and satisfaction.
9. Predictive Resource Allocation: In a crisis like a pandemic, AI can predict hotspots and help in the efficient allocation of medical resources like ventilators, beds, and vaccines.
10. Mental Health Support: AI-powered apps and tools provide mental health support, offering therapies like cognitive-behavioural therapy (CBT) and helping individuals manage stress, anxiety, and depression

Also read: New York Times sues Microsoft and OpenAI for ‘Billion Dollars’ infringing copyrighted work

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13 Personalities Who Are Making the Difference in AI Healthcare

James K. Min

James K. Min, MD is a former Professor of Radiology and Medicine at Weill Cornell Medical College and the Director of the Dalio Institute of Cardiovascular Imaging (ICI) at New York-Presbyterian. He is a board-certified cardiologist with a clinical focus on cardiovascular disease prevention and cardiovascular imaging.

Who is James Min: 

James K. Min, MD is a former Professor of Radiology and Medicine at Weill Cornell Medical College and the Director of the Dalio Institute of Cardiovascular Imaging (ICI) at NewYork-Presbyterian. clinical research programs involving non-invasive imaging technologies including nuclear imaging, cardiac magnetic resonance imaging (CMR), cardiac computed tomography, and positron emission tomography (PET) for the CRF Clinical Trials Center (CTC).

James K. Min Founder and CEO of AI Healthcare Company: Cleerly Health

Cleerly is a digital healthcare company that is transforming the evaluation of heart disease through precision heart care that measures actual heart disease—atherosclerosis (plaque) that builds up in the walls of the heart arteries—over indirect markers of heart disease, as has been the historical approach. We apply advanced artificial intelligence (AI) technology to non-invasive computed tomography (CT) scans to provide physicians and patients with a heart attack prevention approach that is more personalized and proactive.

James K. Min: Social Profiles – LinkedIn

James K. Min: Personal and Educational Details: 

Born: June 23, 1971 

Age: 52 

Birth Place: Norman, Oklahoma, United States

Nationality: American

Alma Mater: Temple University School of Medicine (MD), University of Chicago (B.A.)

Occupation: Director of the Dalio Institute of Cardiovascular Imaging at New York–Presbyterian Hospital/Weill-Cornell Medical Center

Also read: 1.4 Billion workers will need AI Reskilling by 2025, says IBM Research

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Jo Aggarwal, Wysa

Jo is the Founder and CEO of Wysa, a global leader in conversational AI for behavioural health. Wysa has helped improve mental health for over 5 million individuals through 500 million conversations across 90 countries and has received the AI Award from The National Health Service (NHS) in the UK and Breakthrough Device Designation from the FDA in the USA.

Jo has been recognised by the World Economic Forum as one of the Top Innovators of 2022 and received the 2022 Implementation Leadership Award for USA from the eMental Health International Collaborative (eMHIC) alongside Wysa cofounder Ramakant Vempati. In 2021, Jo was listed as one of the Top 25 Women Leaders in Consumer HealthTech by The Healthcare Technology Report.

Jo Aggarwal Founder/CEO: Wysa

Wysa has helped improve mental health for over 5 million individuals through 500 million conversations across 90 countries and has received the AI Award from The National Health Service (NHS) in the UK and Breakthrough Device Designation from the FDA in the USA.

Jo Aggarwal, Wysa Social Profiles: LinkedIn | Twitter  

Jo Aggarwal Personal and Educational Details  

Alma Mater:

• Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi; B.Tech, Chemical Engg
• Indian Institute of Management, Lucknow; Finance and Marketing

Companies worked for: Pearson Education, Tata Group

Achievements (awards won): Stevie Silver Award; Global Telecom Business Innovation Award; built Wysa has prevented hundreds of suicides and helped millions with mental health

Also read: Generative AI in 2023: Best Tools and Products of the Year

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Noémie Elhadad

Noémie Elhadad is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Biomedical Informatics at Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons. She is affiliated with Columbia’s Department of Computer Science and the Columbia Data Science Institute.

She obtained her PhD in 2006 in Computer Science, focusing on multi-document, patient-specific text summarization of the clinical literature. She was on the Computer Science faculty at The City College of New York and the CUNY graduate center starting in 2006 before joining the Department of Biomedical Informatics at Columbia in 2007. Dr. Elhadad served as Chair of the Health Analytics Center at the Columbia Data Science Institute from 2013 to 2016.

Noémie Elhadad Social Profiles:  LinkedIn | Twitter | Google Scholar 

Noémie Elhadad: Personal and Educational Details  

• Affiliation: Columbia University
• Citations: 12,130
• h-index: 49
• Academic advisor: Kathleen McKeown
• Education: Columbia University, MORE
• Research interests: Machine Learning for Healthcare

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David Ferrucci

David Ferrucci is the founder, CEO, and Chief Scientist at Elemental Cognition. David was previously the Director of Applied AI at Bridgewater Associates from December 2012 to December 2021. Prior to that, they were the IBM Fellow and VP of DeepQA (Watson) Technologies at IBM T.J. Watson Research from January 1995 to December 2012. Ferrucci was responsible for building and leading a team of 30 AI Researchers and Software Engineers in the development and application of Watson – a natural language processing system for collecting, analyzing and reasoning over unstructured content. 

David also led the development of Watson from its inception in late 2006 to its landmark victory over the best players of all time in the question-answer game of Jeopardy in 2011 and its early applications in healthcare. 

David Ferrucci Founder/CEO: Elemental Cognition

Before the development of Watson, Ferrucci led an AI team in open-domain question answering and was the Chief Architect for the Unstructured Information Management Architecture (UIMA) at IBM, a framework for integrating and scaling text, speech and image analytics. UIMA was used to build Watson and is now managed as an Apache Open-Source Project.

Noémie Elhadad Social Profiles:  LinkedIn 

Also read: Generative AI Transformative Landscape: Expert Insights and Analysis

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Kristen Fortney

Kristen leads BIOAGE in its mission to develop a broad pipeline of therapies that target ageing in order to increase healthspan and address chronic diseases. 

Kristen draws from a deep background in ageing research and systems biology to develop BIOAGE’s data-driven approach to identify and target the molecular pathways that drive ageing. Kristen received her PhD in Medical Biophysics from the University of Toronto, followed by postdoctoral training at Stanford University where she was a fellow of the Ellison Medical Foundation / American Federation for Aging Research. She has over 10 years of experience developing novel bioinformatics approaches for a data-driven investigation into the mechanisms of ageing and age-related disease, with 18 published papers spanning computational drug discovery, biomarkers of ageing, and the genetics of exceptional human longevity.

Kristen Fortney CEO and Co-founder: BioAge

Kristen Fortney CEO and co-founder of BioAge, a clinical-stage biotechnology company developing a pipeline of treatments to extend healthy lifespan by targeting the molecular causes of aging. The company uses its discovery platform, which combines quantitative analysis of proprietary longitudinal human samples with detailed health records tracking individuals over their lifespan, to map out the key molecular pathways that impact healthy human ageing. By targeting these pathways with a large and mechanistically diverse portfolio of drugs, BioAge will unlock opportunities to treat or even prevent these diseases in entirely new ways.

Kristen Fortney Social Profiles: LinkedIn | Twitter |  Google Scholar 

Also read: DeepSouth: World’s First Supercomputer with 228 Trillion Neural Links as Human Brain To Be Activated in 2024

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Daphne Koller

Daphne Koller is an Israeli-American computer scientist. She was a professor in the Department of Computer Science at Stanford University and a MacArthur Foundation fellowship recipient. She is one of the founders of Coursera, an online education platform.

Daphne Koller is CEO and Founder of Insitro, a machine learning-driven drug discovery and development company. Daphne is also co-founder of Engageli, was the Rajeev Motwani Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University, where she served on the faculty for 18 years, the co-CEO and President of Coursera, and the Chief Computing Officer of Calico Labs. She is the author of over 300 refereed publications with an h-index of over 145. Daphne was recognized as one of TIME Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People in 2012.

Daphne Koller CEO and Founder: Insitro

She received the MacArthur Foundation Fellowship in 2004, the ACM Prize in Computing in 2008, the ACM AAAI Allen Newell Award in 2019, and the AnitaB.org Technical Leadership Abie Award Winner in 2022. Daphne was inducted into the National Academy of Science in 2023, into the National Academy of Engineering in 2011 and elected a fellow of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence in 2004, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2014, and the International Society of Computational Biology in 2017.

Born:  August 27, 1968 (age 55)

Education: Hebrew University of Jerusalem (BSc, MSc); Stanford University (PhD); 

Known for: Machine learning, Graphical models, MOOCs, Coursera

Awards: ISCB Fellow (2017); IJCAI Computers and Thought Award (2001); MacArthur Fellow (2004)

PECASE (1999); ACM Prize in Computing (2007)

Scientific Career: Fields Machine learning; Computational biology; Computer vision; Artificial intelligence

Alma Mater: Stanford University; University of California, Berkeley

Kristen Fortney Social Profiles: LinkedIn | Twitter |  Google Scholar 

Also read: Impact of AI on the Behavior of 4.59 Billion Social Media Users

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Claire Novorol

Claire is a trained doctor and served as a pediatrician in London before specializing in clinical genetics. With a degree in both pathology and medicine from the University of Bristol and a PhD in Neuroscience from the University of Cambridge, Claire oversees all of Ada’s medical affairs. As an industry thought leader, she gives a voice to the clinicians, patients, and doctors to ensure that our product meets their needs.

Claire Novorol Co-founder and Chief Medical Officer: Ada

Claire’s career has been guided by her deep interest in developing creative solutions to tackle real-world problems. At Ada, she is responsible for overseeing medical affairs, and clinical partnerships and for ensuring that Ada’s products are tailored to support patient needs. She has advised several health start-ups throughout her career and also founded Doctorpreneurs, a global community of over 10,0000 medical professionals who share an interest in health entrepreneurship.

Claire Novorol Social Profiles: LinkedIn | Twitter 

Also read: Country Wise Generative AI Tools Users for Text, Images, Audio and Videos based on Global Interest Report 2023

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Brendan Frey

Brendan Frey is an internationally acclaimed entrepreneur, engineer and scientist. He is Head of Platform, Chief Innovation Officer, Founder and board member of Deep Genomics and co-founder of the Vector Institute for Artificial Intelligence. 

Brendan made fundamental contributions in the fields of deep learning, genomic medicine, and information technology. He co-authored over 200 papers in these areas, including over a dozen that appeared in Nature, Science and Cell and were on multiple occasions highlighted on the front covers of those magazines. His work with Geoffrey Hinton on the ‘wake-sleep algorithm’ helped to launch the field of deep learning (Science 1995). His work on deep learning and factor graphs forms the foundation of thousands of products used worldwide; for example, the WiFi telecommunications standard is based on an algorithm that Brendan co-invented.

Founder and CEO Brendan Frey: Deep Genomics

Brendan was a pioneer in developing AI systems that could accurately predict normal and pathological cell and genome biology, facilitating biomedical breakthroughs. This work led to the discovery of new biology, the founding of Deep Genomics in 2015, the first AI system for predicting pathogenic mutations and identifying therapeutic targets, and the development of new therapeutic candidates for patients with genetic disorders. 

Born: 29 August 1968 (age 55)

Alma Mater: University of Toronto (PhD

Known for: Deep Genomics Inc | First Drug Discovered by AI | Vector Institute | Genome Biology | Wake-Sleep Algorithm | Affinity Propagation | Factor Graphs

Awards: FRSC (2015) | John C. Polanyi

Brendan Frey Social Profiles: LinkedIn | Twitter | Google Scholar

Also read: Top 10 Free AI Courses from Harvard University in 2024

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Pushmeet Kohli

Pushmeet Kohli is a computer scientist at Google DeepMind where he holds the position of Vice President of research for the “Secure and Reliable AI  and AI for Science and Sustainability”. Before joining DeepMind, he was a partner scientist and director of research at Microsoft Research and a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Cambridge. Kohli’s research investigates applications of machine learning and computer vision He has also made contributions in game theory, discrete algorithms and psychometrics.

Pushmeet Kohli is currently the Head of Research for Science, Robustness, and Reliability with DeepMind. Before joining DeepMind, he was the Director of Research with the Cognition Group, Microsoft. During his ten years at Microsoft, he worked with Microsoft Labs in Seattle, Cambridge, and Bengaluru, and enacted several roles and responsibilities; including being a Technical Advisor to Rick Rashid, the Chief Research Officer of Microsoft.

Pushmeet Kohli VP of Research:  Google DeepMind

He published in the fields of machine learning, computer vision, information retrieval, and game theory. His papers have appeared in computer vision, machine learning, robotics, and AI conferences. His research interests include intelligent systems and computational sciences. 

Alma mater: Trinity Hall, University of Cambridge, National Institute of Technology, Warangal and

Oxford Brookes University (PhD)

Scientific career: Fields Machine learning | Artificial intelligence| Computer vision

Institutions: Google DeepMind

Pushmeet Kohli  Social Profiles: LinkedIn | Twitter | Google Scholar

Also read: List of Generative AI Models You Need To Know

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Alex Wiltschko

Alex Wiltschko is the CEO of Osmo, and an entrepreneur in residence at GV. He joined the life sciences team in 2022, where he’s focused on advancing the field of digital olfaction. He is also the co-host of the Theory and Practice podcast alongside GV venture partner Anthony Philippakis. The podcast features conversations at the cutting edge of biology and computer science.

Previously, Alex was a staff research scientist at Google Research, where he worked at the intersection of machine learning and biology since 2017.

Alex Wiltschko Chief Executive Officer: Osmo

Alex Wiltschko received a Bachelor of Science (B.S.) degree in Neuroscience from the University of Michigan in the years spanning from 2005 to 2009. Subsequently, they pursued a Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) degree in Neuroscience at Harvard University, completing their studies from 2009 to 2016.

Alex Wiltschko  Social Profiles: LinkedIn | Twitter | Google Scholar

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