Episode 38: Dr. Sam Volchenboum, Director, Center for Research Informatics, U Chicago Medicine

Innovation Rising, Presented by Healthbox

Our guest today, Dr. Sam Volchenboum, is the Associate Professor of Pediatrics, Associate Chief Research Informatics Officer, and Director, Center for Research Informatics at University of Chicago Medicine. Dr. Volchenboum is an expert in pediatric cancers and blood disorders. He has a special interest in treating children with neuroblastoma, a tumor of the sympathetic nervous system.

In addition to caring for patients, Dr. Volchenboum studies ways to harness computers to enable research and foster innovation using large data sets. He directs the development of the International Neuroblastoma Risk Group Database project, which connects international patient data with external information such as genomic data and tissue availability. The Center he runs provides computational support for the Biological Sciences Division at the University of Chicago, including high-performance computing, applications development, bioinformatics, and access to the clinical research data warehouse. He is also currently collaborating with Google to use machine learning for better health care and has been written about in both Wired.com and the Washington Post. If all that wasn’t enough, Dr. Volchenboum is also co-founder of Litmus Health, a data science platform for early-stage clinical trials.

In this Episode, Chuck, new Healthbox team member and guest host Jessica, and Dr. Volchenboum discuss:

• Why Dr. Volchenboum chose to earn a Master’s in Biomedical Informatics from MIT and Harvard Medical School and how he merged that with his passion for computer science
• What the old way predictive modeling looked like and how data was made actionable, before the use of current applications of artificial intelligence
• What the U Chicago Medicine’s Center for Healthcare Delivery Science and Innovation is focused on and some of the biggest problems Dr. Volchenboum and his team are working to solve
• How Dr. Volchenboum’s collaboration with Google came to be, the big problems being tackled, and which of Google’s tools are being used
• As co-founder of Litmus Health, Dr. Volchenboum talks about the company and what spurred him to make the entrepreneurship leap
• What’s next for both Dr. Volchenboum’s Google collaboration and at Litmus Health

Connect with Dr. Volchenboum and his work:

• LinkedIn
• U Chicago Profile
• UChicago Medicine collaborates with Google to use machine learning for better health care
• UChicago Medicine and Google — a data-driven duo to watch
• Data Commons to Support Pediatric Cancer Research
• Development and Validation of a Deep Learning Algorithm for Detection of Diabetic Retinopathy in Retinal Fundus Photographs
• • Blog post
• Litmus Health

Connect with Healthbox:

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Listen to this episode on Apple Podcasts, SoundCloud, or Libsyn