The National Academy of Medicine has named Emory radiologist Judy Wawira Gichoya, MBChB, MS, one of ten 2023 Emerging Leaders in Health and Medicine Scholars. The scholars program provides a platform for a new generation of leaders to collaborate with the academy and its members to advance science, combat persistent challenges in health and medicine, and spark transformative change to improve health for all.
Dr. Gichoya, an associate professor in the Department of Radiology and Imaging Sciences, is a multidisciplinary researcher trained as both an interventional radiologist and informatician whose research follows three themes: curating diverse datasets for medical imaging, evaluating fairness and mitigating bias in machine learning algorithms, and validating artificial intelligence (AI) models in the real-world setting. The work is both groundbreaking and timely.
For example, her leadership of a multi-institutional study last year discovered deep learning models could predict the race of a patient from a radiologic image even when the image had no patient information associated. The paper, “AI Recognition of Patient Race in Medical Imaging: A Modelling Study” published by The Lancet Digital Health, set off a national firestorm. Since then, Gichoya has continued to investigate and uncover both the danger of hidden bias in AI models and potential mechanisms for harnessing AI to positively address racial disparities. Most recently, she convened scholars from around the world with expertise in radiology, informatics, computer sciences, biomedical engineering, and medicine for a three-day Health AI Bias Datathon and Symposium hosted by the Emory University School of Medicine and presented by Gichoya’s Healthcare Innovations and Translational Informatics Lab and Morehouse School of Medicine.
“We are thrilled to see Judy honored as a NAM Emerging Leader for her incredible scholarship and leadership,” says Amit Saindane, MD, MBA, professor and chair of the Department of Radiology and Imaging Sciences. “She is a powerhouse not only in radiology but is an international thought leader continually working to ensure AI works to advance equity in health care and ameliorate health disparities, not just locally and nationally, but also globally.”
Dr. Gichoya’s work is part of Emory’s AI.Humanity Initiative, which brings together the full intellectual power of Emory University to shape the AI revolution to better human health, generate economic value, and promote social justice. Gichoya serves on AI.Humanity’s Advisory Group and works to recruit prominent AI scholars to Emory, build a community of AI researchers, and train students for AI work.
Dr. Gichoya has garnered several honors for her work. She is a Data and Technology Advancement (DATA) Scholar of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) working to establish new data resources for the Harnessing Data Science for Health Discovery and Innovation in Africa (DSI-Africa) program. She also was named the Most Influential Radiology Researcher by Aunt Minnie, a national radiology-related news outlet. Dr. Gichoya additionally serves on numerous editorial boards including the New England Journal of Medicine AI journal, and Radiology AI journal.