Imaging informatics and its potential to improve the detection, diagnosis, and treatment of disease—particularly cancer through artificial intelligence—is becoming increasingly relevant to medical physics. That is why we celebrate Dr. Keyvan Farahani, CBIIT’s imaging informatics program director. Because of Dr. Farahani’s distinguished career in cancer imaging research, medical physics, and involvement with the American Association of Physicists in Medicine (AAPM), he has been selected as a 2021 AAPM Fellow. 

Medical physicists study applications of electromagnetic radiation for the diagnosis and treatment of cancer. The field is generally divided into two categories: medical imaging (i.e., x-ray, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), optical and ultrasound imaging, etc.) and radiation therapy. Over the past several years, AAPM has been interested in expanding its role beyond these traditional categories. Similar to many other biomedical scientific societies, they have made informatics a focus of their activities going forward. Imaging informatics is both a key component of image-guided therapy (i.e., image-guided radiation therapy, focused ultrasound therapy, ultrasound and robotics-guided interventions) and fundamental to algorithmic challenges for benchmarking innovative software tools for imaging and therapy—two areas that Dr. Farahani specializes in and has contributed to at AAPM and the greater research community. CBIIT’s imaging informatics initiatives, notably imaging archives, represent some of the most advanced developments in the field. Dr. Farahani’s involvement in such initiatives (as well as his seasoned background in image-guided interventions, including surgery, drug delivery, and various forms of minimally invasive therapies) have put him in a position to support AAPM’s endeavor to promote data science through imaging and informatics, in service of cancer research.

“Medical physicists are intimately involved with the generation, analysis, and use of imaging data in all areas of cancer care,” says Dr. Farahani. “They are key partners in expanding the imaging informatics domain. We can work together to further enable secondary use of their data and build informatics models and use cases based on their specific areas of clinical practice or research interest. This will help to further disseminate their knowledge while contributing to resources that would benefit the cancer research community.”

Dr. Farahani will be formally recognized as a 2021 AAPM Fellow during the July 2021 AAPM 63^rd Annual Meeting and Exhibition.