Principal Investigator
Dr. Kline is dually trained in both medicine and engineering. She completed both her undergraduate and PhD studies in engineering, focusing on machine learning. She later went on to complete an MD and expanded her breadth of applications. She completed her postdoc at Northwestern University before joining as faculty in June 2023. Her interests lie at the intersection of medicine and engineering, specifically in leveraging algorithmic decision-making support for translational applications to medicine. Her work has led to the development of novel methods for handling missing data, innovative metrics for evaluating the reliability of machine learning predictions, and information fusion of multimodal data streams. With an emphasis on structural data, computer vision, reinforcement learning and generative algorithms, she hopes to change the efficiency and reliability with which medicine is practiced.
Lab Administration
Madeha Jafri, MD
Maddy provides administrative support to the faculty of the Cardiothoracic Division of Bluhm Cardiovascular Institute at Northwestern Medicine and the Kline Engineering Lab. She has worked in the healthcare industry for over 10yrs. She received my MD from Spartan Health Sciences University.
Postdocs
Tom Liu, MD, MSAI
Tom completed the MSAI program at NU, and is a cardiac surgery resident. His research interests lie in computer vision as it applies to cardiac imaging. He is also the co-founder of Xtasis Inc. with Dr. Kline
External Collaborators
Vinesh Appadurai, MBBS
Vinesh is a multimodal cardiac imaging fellow (cMRI, CT, and echo) within Bluhm Cardiovascular Institute. Major research interest areas lie in pixel quantification for disease detection.
Mark Ding
Mark is a co-founder and current CFO of Xtasis Inc. and acts as business partner to Dr. Kline. He previously worked at Instacart as Product Lead for Health after working as an investor.
Parmeen Bindra, MSc
Parmeen is a data analyst on the Research Analytics team. He enjoys working on new applications using clinical data, and has been involved in developing structured databases in the EDW. He has worked on several research projects with the CTU and is pursuing an MBA. He hopes to use this unique technical and leadership skills to improve medical care at NMHC.
Dan Pittman, MSc
Dan is a developer/researcher from the University of Calgary who has extensive experience in medical image processing, and creating production-level code.
Nick Easton, MSAI
Nick as a machine learning engineer from Dr. Faraz Ahmad’s research group and working within the Center for Artificial Intelligence at BCVI, and collaborates closely with Dr. Kline.
Rashmi Nedadur, MD
Rashmi Nedadur is an advanced cardiac surgery fellow from University of Toronto who has a keen research interest in the areas of artificial intelligence and its applications in cardiac surgery.
Masters fellows/students
Tyler J. Smith
Tyler is an MSAI Fellow and MD Student. His research interests lie in computer vision and large language models.
Amogh Karnik, MD, MSc
Dr. Karnik is a cardiology fellow at Northwestern Memorial Hospital, MSAI Candidate at Northwestern University and HeartShare Research Fellow
Jonathan Hourmozdi, MD
Johnny is a cardiology fellow at Northwestern Memorial Hospital and is currently an MSAI Fellow.
Heather Byrd, MSc
Heather is currently pursuing a master’s degree in Data Science from the Northwestern University. She also works as a Research Data Analyst Associate in the BCVI Clinical Trials Unit at Northwestern. Her research interests include Natural Language Processing and Large Language Models.
Undergraduate Researchers
Aanand Patel
Sophomore double majoring in CS and Data Science with a keen interest in the application of technology to the medical field using AI.
Faculty Collaborators
Nils Forkert, PhD
Dr. Nils Daniel Forkert is a Full Professor at the University of Calgary in the Departments of Radiology, Clinical Neurosciences, and Electrical and Software Engineering.
He is a Canada Research Chair in Medical Image Analysis.
Faraz Ahmad, MD, MS
Assistant Professor of Medicine (Cardiology) and Preventive Medicine (Health and Biomedical Informatics)
Associate Director of C4AI
Yuan Luo, PhD
Director, Institute for Augmented Intelligence in Medicine’s Center for Collaborative AI in Healthcare
Associate Professor of Preventive Medicine (Health and Biomedical Informatics), McCormick School of Engineering and Pediatrics
Patrick M McCarthy, MD
Executive Director, Bluhm Cardiovascular Institute
Heller-Sacks Professor of Cardiothoracic Surgery
Professor of Surgery (Cardiac Surgery) and McCormick School of Engineering
Doug Johnston, MD
Chief of Cardiac Surgery in the Department of Surgery
Professor of Surgery (Cardiac Surgery)
Sanjiv J Shah, MD
Stone Endowed Professor of Medicine
Director of Research, Bluhm Cardiovascular Institute
Director, Northwestern HFpEF Program
Division of Cardiology, Department of Medicine, Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine
Baljash S Cheema, MD, MSCI, MSAI
Assistant Professor of Medicine (Cardiology)