Michael F. Chiang, MD, Director, The National Eye Institute (NEI).
By background, I am a pediatric ophthalmologist and I am also board-certified in clinical informatics. My research focuses on the interface of biomedical informatics and clinical ophthalmology in areas such as telehealth, artificial intelligence, electronic health records, data science, and genotype-phenotype correlation. For example, my group has developed an assistive artificial intelligence system for retinopathy of prematurity (ROP), which is a leading cause of childhood blindness in the US and worldwide.
At NEI, I lead a group of very talented people, dedicated to eliminating vision loss and improving quality of life through vision research. I also participate in or help lead a number of initiatives at the National Institutes of Health in areas such as data science, clinical research, medical imaging, and diversity/equity/inclusion/accessibility.
Transcript
[Michael F. Chiang, MD] I'm an ophthalmologist by background and I actually started my career in 2001 at Columbia University as an NLM postdoctoral fellow. And since then, I've spent 20 years in academia as a clinician scientist working at the interface of ophthalmology and biomedical informatics.
In November 2020, I started a new job at NIH as director of the National Eye Institute. And I'm really excited to be a investigator here at the National Library of Medicine because you know in a way it's what I started my career doing.
At the National Eye Institute, our mission is to eliminate vision loss and improve quality of life through vision research, and that's an application domain. And at the National Library of Medicine, what we do is methodological research in biomedical informatics and data science. And I think it's really important to connect the methodology with the application.
One of the things that I do is I develop artificial intelligence methods to diagnose a pediatric retinal disease called retinopathy of prematurity. It's one of the leading causes of blindness in babies around the world.
Stevie Wonder is someone who went blind from ROP in the 1950s before there was a treatment for it.
And we've developed an AI system that received FDA breakthrough status. And one of the things that we've been doing is trying to find ways to apply AI to real world problems in eye care for kids.
Babies who are premature, and therefore at risk for retinopathy of prematurity, come disproportionately from urban and rural medically underserved areas. And there are huge challenges in terms of delivering eye care and health care overall to those babies.
And so, one of the things that I did at the very beginning of my career is that we work to develop and validate telemedicine systems for retinopathy prematurity diagnosis.
And now what we're starting to do is to experiment with - can we implement AI artificial intelligence into those telemedicine systems to be able to improve the accuracy and the quality of the diagnosis that we're able to make remotely.
There's never been a time in history where we've had so much access to science and technology as being applied to healthcare. And I think one of the challenges for the future is - how to move things like biomedical informatics and artificial intelligence and data science into the mainstream of healthcare.