Join us on Wednesday, November 10, 2021, 4:00-500 PM, for a “Data Citizens: A Distinguished Lecture Series” talk featuring Dr. Eliot Siegel, Professor and Vice-Chair of Research Information Systems at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, Department of Diagnostic Radiology and Nuclear Medicine, and Chief of Radiology and Nuclear Medicine for the Veterans Affairs Maryland Health Care System, both in Baltimore, MD.

TALK TITLE:  “AI and the Presumed Demise of Radiologists”

Paraphrasing Mark Twain’s famous quote, “The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated,” predictions made during the past half a dozen years about the demise of “Radiologist” as a profession have been made with alarming frequency.  Geoffrey Hinton, one of the “fathers” of Deep Learning stated that “They should stop training Radiologists now.” Andrew Ng, Professor of Computer Science at Stanford, declared that it would be easier to replace a Radiologist than his personal assistant.  Ezekiel Emmanuel proclaimed in the New England Journal of Medicine that, Radiologists, as a profession, could cease to exist in the next few years and that AI was the greatest threat to the practice.  A half a dozen years later, it has become obvious that those predictions made by some of the most acclaimed “experts” in Computer Science and Medicine got it completely wrong.  This talk will explore the fascinating, daunting, and yet tantalizing challenges associated with the implementation of AI in clinical practice for Diagnostic Imaging and will discuss the hype, reality, and future of Deep Learning for Diagnostic Imaging.

ZOOM Link Passcode 342895 | Wed. 11/10 4:00-5:00 PM

About Data Citizens

Data Citizens: A Distinguished Lecture Series is an ongoing course of in-depth talks by experts in the field of data science on a wide variety of topics including data visualization, big data, artificial intelligence, and predictive analytics. This lecture series is co-sponsored by the Miami Clinical and Translational Science Institute (CTSI) and is free and open to the public.

About Eliot Siegel

IDSC is pleased to welcome Dr. Siegel as a Distinguished Visiting Fellow for the group on AI for Radiology.

Dr. Siegel also has adjunct appointments at the undergraduate level at the University of Maryland Baltimore County (UMBC), in the department of computer science and at the University of Maryland College Park (UMCP) in the department of biomedical engineering.  He teaches at the fellow, resident, medical student, undergraduate, and high school levels.  Dr. Siegel has been mentor/advisor and Ph.D. and Master’s thesis faculty for hundreds of students at all these levels during his career.

As Chief of Radiology and Nuclear Medicine for the Veterans Affairs Maryland Health Care System, Dr. Siegel is responsible for medical imaging within what is referred to as VISN 5, which includes four medical centers in West Virginia and the Washington DC VA Medical Center, as well as those in Maryland.  Dr. Siegel’s responsibilities at the local level include administration of the imaging department and, his work as a clinical radiologist with a subspecialty in Nuclear Medicine.  At the regional level, Dr. Siegel has responsibility for multiple VA hospitals, and, at the national level, Dr. Siegel has been involved in policymaking in diagnostic imaging, but more specifically in digital imaging and digital information systems.

Under his guidance, the Baltimore VA became the first filmless healthcare enterprise in the world in 1993. He has written over 300 articles/book chapters about PACS and digital imaging and a wide variety of other topics in medical imaging, and, has edited numerous books on the topic, including Filmless Radiology and Security Issues in the Digital Medical Enterprise. Dr. Siegel has also participated in a wide variety of roles including Principal Investigator on many NIH, other government agencies, and industrial grants.  He has presented talks at the International level (most often as keynote speaker) and has given over 1,000 talks at grand rounds, symposia, and international conferences around the world.  He currently serves on a dozen editorial boards.

Dr. Siegel has won numerous awards at the University of Maryland including medical school mentor of the year.  He has been named as overall Radiology Researcher of the Year and Educator of the year in a competition that was international.  Dr. Siegel has also been selected by the editorial board of Medical Imaging as one of the top radiologists in the US on multiple occasions.

Dr. Siegel worked at the National Cancer Institute where he created The Cancer Imaging Archive (TCIA), the Annotation and Image Mark-up “standard” and other initiatives.  He was symposium chairman for the SPIE Medical Imaging Meeting, served as chair of Publications for SIIM (Society for Imaging Informatics in Medicine) and is a fellow by the ACR (American College of Radiology) and SIIM. He served as chairman of the RSNA’s (Radiological Society of North America) Medical Imaging Resource Committee. Dr. Siegel also worked with the IBM “Jeopardy” team as a medical advisor and has worked with IBM, subsequently, on a variety of projects in natural language processing, the electronic medical record, and medical image interpretation.  He is currently co-chair of the SIIM Conference on Machine Intelligence in Medical Imaging (C-MIMI).  His areas of interest and responsibility at both the local and national levels include digital imaging and PACS, telemedicine, electronic health records, and informatics and AI in medicine.

Dr. Siegel is often interviewed via print or video media for his opinions on many topics in diagnostic imaging, but with a focus on digital imaging technologies.  He is sought out as a source for prediction of where medicine—specifically medical imaging—is going in the near and distant future, and as such, is often thought of as a futurist by his colleagues.