Invited Talk by Bharat Rao, PhD

Bharat Rao, PhD Head, Knowledge Solutions Group, Healthcare Analytics & Business Intelligence, Siemens Healthcare, Inc., Malvern, PA, USA Date: Monday, 16 January 2012 Time: 16:00 Location: MI 02.08.020

Mining Medical Data

Abstract: Healthcare is on the verge of a revolution, which will be driven by “knowledge.” This knowledge is being derived both by traditional clinical studies and also by mining vast quantities of patient data. In this talk I will describe data mining applications and deployed products in 3 areas of healthcare:

• mining medical images to automatically detect potentially abnormal structures
• automated decision-support & inference from EMR’s
• personalized medicine for therapy selection.

There are two fundamental challenges that need to be overcome to make “knowledge-driven healthcare” a reality. The first, is the “use of knowledge:.”Much is known about medicine (there are vast textbooks & a rich history of publication). However, computerized decision-support systems that can automatically comb through this corpus to combine relevant knowledge with patient data to assist the physician poses several challenges, many of which can be tackled by the data mining community.

In this talk, I will discuss the second challenge, the discovery of new medical knowledge: The personalization of medicine is being fueled by advances in gene sequencing and molecular imaging technology. Machine learning methods are being used to discover biomarkers – these are essentially, classifiers that extract information from patient data (including free text, images, genomics), and can be used to predict the future risk of disease, to diagnose a patient, to provide patient prognosis conditioned on different treatments (and thus select therapy), and to monitor the impact of a therapy.

The talk concludes by identifying some challenges for the data mining community.

Biography: R. Bharat Rao, PhD is Senior Director and Head of the Knowledge Solutions (KS) group Health Analytics & Business Intelligence business unit in Siemens Healthcare , Inc, a subsidiary of Siemens AG . Dr. Rao and his group have developed and deployed data mining products that analyze millions of patient records, impacting three major areas in healthcare. These include, automated quality measurement and decision-support from hospitals EMR’s, computer-aided diagnosis systems to identify suspicious lesions on medical images, and predictive models for personalized medicine.

Dr. Rao has received numerous innovation awards, including the 2011 ACM SIGKDD Lifetime Service award (the highest service award in the field of data mining and knowledge discovery) for “service to society” via “pioneering data mining applications.” Dr. Rao was also selected as the Siemens Inventor of the Year in 2005, awarded yearly to one employee in Siemens Healthcare (40,000 employees worldwide) for the REMIND platform. He is the only two-time winner of the Data Mining Practice Prize, awarded for the best deployed industrial and government data mining application (from ACM and IEEE for CAD applications and the REMIND platform, respectively).

Dr. Rao is recognized as a leading expert in machine learning, health analytics, and mining 'big data.' He has been granted 41 patents (50 more pending), has over 100 scholarly publications, many best paper awards, has published a book, and gives about 15 invited and plenary talks every year. He is lead / co-PI for many grants for the European Union, NIH, NCI, Netherlands Cancer, and South Carolina Health Network. He is the technical lead of an consortium building the first Euro-US rapid learning IT network for research, data sharing and privacy-preserving mining, deployed at cancer centers in 5 nations. Dr. Rao's research interests include developing methods to mine structured and unstructured data (free text, images, genomics, guidelines), knowledge discovery, and decision-support.

The KS group is headquartered in Malvern, PA, USA. The group launched the first-to-market startup offering in healthcare quality, Soarian Quality Measures (and also as a software as a service offering from the Siemens private cloud). SQM is a leading offering in Siemens Healthcare IT portfolio, and analyzes millions of EMR's annually. The CAD solutions developed by Dr. Rao's group are used by radiologists in thousands of hospitals worldwide. Dr. Rao manages a group of 100 people in 4 countries in 3 continents.

Dr. Rao received a B.Tech in Electronics Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, and an M.S. and Ph.D. focusing on machine learning from the Dept. of Electrical Engineering, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, in 1993. He joined Siemens Corporate Research and formed the Data Mining group there. In 2002, he moved to Siemens Healthcare to help found the “Computer-Aided Diagnosis” group, and founded the Knowledge Solutions group, Siemens Health in 2008.

Dr. Rao's passions outside of the sphere of Science and Business include the sport of cricket, classic rock, the history of science and the study of philosophy and religion. He is married and has two children.