Meet The UBC VGH AI Echo Core Lab Team

Dr. Teresa Tsang

Director of Echo Lab and AI Echo Core Lab Professor

Dr. Tsang is the Director of UBC VGH Artificial Intelligence Echo Core Lab and VGH UBC Echo Lab, Clinician Scientist, Professor of Medicine (Tenure) within the Division of Cardiology, and Associate Head of Research, Department of Medicine at UBC.  Dr. Tsang was a Clinician Scientist, Echocardiographer, and Professor of Medicine in Cardiology at the Mayo Clinic, and Mayo Foundation Scholar before joining UBC. She is Canadian Royal College and American Board certified in Cardiology and Internal Medicine. She subspecializes in echocardiography, and completed also fellowship in clinical epidemiology at National Institutes of Health, Bethesda Maryland. She is a CIHR, NSERC, and Vancouver Coastal Health Research Institute funded investigator. Her focus of research includes artificial intelligence in imaging, atrial fibrillation, echocardiographic prediction and prevention of atrial fibrillation, heart failure, and stroke, atrial remodeling and reversal, and diastolic dysfunction. She is on the Board of Directors for the Canadian Society of Echocardiography, and is a member of the British Columbia Law Institute Artificial Intelligence and Civil Liability Committee.

Dr. Christina Luong

Co-Director of AI Echo Core Lab Assistant Professor

Dr. Luong is a clinical assistant professor within the Division of Cardiology at the University of British Columbia and member of the Vancouver General Hospital and University of British Columbia Hospital Echocardiography Laboratory. She specializes in echocardiography with a special interest in stress echo. Her research focuses on the development and application of machine learning models to echocardiography and works closely with UBC computer and biomedical engineering.

She practices general cardiology and provides services for the VGH STAT clinic and inpatient consultation service. Dr. Luong is a graduate of the University of Alberta medical school, and UBC Internal Medicine and Cardiology fellowship programs. She completed advanced fellowships in echocardiography at Vancouver General Hospital and at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. She also completed a Master’s of Health Science through the University of British Columbia.

Dr. Darwin Yeung

Clinical Assistant Professor

Dr. Yeung received his medical degree from the University of Toronto followed by residency training in Internal Medicine and Cardiology at the University of British Columbia. He completed advanced fellowships in echocardiography at Vancouver General Hospital and at the Mayo Clinic, and is currently pursuing a Master of Public Health degree at the Harvard School of Public Health. He is an echocardiographer at the VGH/UBCH Echo Lab and a specialist at the St. Paul’s Hospital Hypertrophic Cardiomyopathy Clinic. His current clinical and research interests focus on imaging of various cardiomyopathies and the application of strain imaging in the diagnosis and treatment of patients with cardiovascular disease.

Dr. Michael Tsang

Clinical Assistant Professor

Dr. Michael Tsang is a Clinical Assistant Professor in the Division of Cardiology at the University of British Columbia. He completed his MD and residency training at the University of British Columbia, and advanced echocardiography and research training at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. His clinical expertise and research interests include the use of echocardiography for assessing valvular heart disease and the application of echocardiographic strain imaging in the evaluation of myocardial dysfunction.

Dr. Parvathy Nair

Clinical Associate Professor

Dr. Ken Gin

Clinical Professor

Dr. Gin graduated MD at UBC in 1985; completed his internal medicine and adult cardiology training, followed by an echocardiography fellowship. Appointed by the UBC Department of Medicine and VGH Division of Cardiology in 1992, he achieved the rank of Clinical Professor in 2008. He was Director, UBC Postgraduate Cardiology Program for 10 years until 2009; under his tutelage, the program grew from 2 residents to 17. From 2009 to 2012 he served as Head of the UBC Division of Cardiology for Vancouver Acute. Since 2009 to the present, he has served as Head of the VGH Division of Cardiology. He has received numerous teaching awards, including the prestigious 2010 UBC Killam Teaching Prize and the 2011 Canadian Cardiovascular Society Distinguished Teaching Award. He has published in the NEJM, Lancet, JACC and other high impact peer-reviewed journals. In 2013 he received the Clinical Excellence award from VGH.

Dr. John Jue

Clinical Associate Professor

Dr. Purang Abolmaesumi

Professor

Purang Abolmaesumi received his BSc (1995) and MSc (1997) from Sharif University of Technology, Iran, and his PhD (2002) from UBC, all in electrical engineering. From 2002 to 2009, he was a faculty member with the School of Computing, Queen’s University. He then joined the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at UBC, where he is a Canada Research Chair, Tier II, in Biomedical Engineering and a Professor, with Associate Membership to the Department of Urologic Sciences.

Dr. Abolmaesumi is internationally recognized and has received numerous awards for his pioneering developments in ultrasound image processing, image registration and image-guided interventions. He is the recipient of the Killam Faculty Research Prize and the Killam Award for Excellence in Mentoring at UBC. He currently serves as an Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging, and has served as an Associate Editor of the IEEE TBME between 2008 and 2012. He is a Board Member of the International Society for Computer Aided Surgery, and serves on the Program Committees of the Medical Image Computing and Computing and Computer Assisted Intervention (MICCAI), International Society for Optics and Photonics (SPIE) Medical Imaging, and the International Conference on Information Processing in Computer Assisted Interventions (IPCAI). Dr. Abolmaesumi is the General Chair of IPCAI 2014-16, has served as Program Chair of IPCAI 2012 in Pisa and Workshop and Tutorial Chair of MICCAI 2011 in Toronto, and is currently server as a Chair of Workshops for MICCAI 2015.

Dr. Robert Rohling

Professor

Robert Rohling is a Professor with a joint appointment in Electrical and Computer Engineering & Mechanical Engineering at UBC. Dr. Rohling’s research is in the field of biomedical engineering with specialization in medical ultrasound. Dr. Rohling is also the Director of the Institute for Computing, Information and Cognitive Systems (ICICS).

Current Research Focus

Dr. Rohling’s general area of interest is biomedical engineering with specific interests in ultrasound imaging, surgical robotics and medical information systems. In ultrasound imaging, he is developing new acquisition techniques for both accurate diagnosis and successful therapy. In surgical robotics, he is working on the integration of ultrasound guidance. In medical information systems, he is using automated processing tools, such as artificial intelligence, to provide actionable information to the user. All of these topics have a strong translational component.

Seyedeh Neda Ahmadi Amiri

M.Sc. Student

M.Sc. Student
Electrical and Computer Engineering

Atrin Arya

Atrin Arya

Fatemeh Taheri Dezaki

Ph.D. Candidate

In her research, Fatemeh leverages structural information (spatial and temporal) present in big data sets that can be harvested using advanced machine learning/AI approaches. In particular, her Ph.D. thesis focused on deriving untapped rich information present in the raw echocardiography videos collected over many years from Vancouver General Hospital servers using new self-supervised, supervised, and semi-supervised techniques. Such AI-based solutions can assist and augment clinical decision-making for disease diagnosis and management, streamline the clinical workflow, and subsequently increase the patient throughput in the healthcare system. Her work during her industrial collaborations extends structural information extraction to other data domains and applications, namely monitoring mining equipment videos and analyzing the time series data.

Fahimeh Fooladgar

Postdoctoral Research Fellow

Postdoctoral Research Fellow
Electrical and Computer Engineering

Andrea Fung

PhD student

Sean Ghaeli

Undergraduate engineering and physics student

Zahra Gholami

Master student

Jamie Goco

Master student

Ang Nan (Michael) Gu

Ph.D. Candidate

Michael is a graduate student in UBC’s Master of Applied Science Program. His research is focused on integrating ultrasound imaging with machine learning technology to improve the quality and accessibility of healthcare in BC.

Golara Javadi

Ph.D. Candidate

Golara is a Ph.D. Candidate at the University of British Columbia (UBC) advised by Purang Abolmaesumi. Her research interests lie in topics that enhance people’s lives with the help of AI. She is supported by the UBC Four Years Fellowship. Golara received her MSc in Engineering Science from Simon Fraser University (SFU) and her BSc in Electrical Engineering from Isfahan University of Technology (IUT). In the past, she has done internships at Borealis AI and worked as a team lead of engineering in the distribution power industry.

Nima Kondori

Master Student

Mobina Mahdavi

M.Sc. Student

M.Sc. Student
Electrical and Computer Engineering

Masoud Mokhtari

M.Sc. Student

M.Sc. Student
Electrical and Computer Engineering

Armin Saadat

M.Sc. Student, Electrical and Computer Engineering

Samira Sojoudi

Research Engineer

Research Engineer
Electrical and Computer Engineering

Nguyen Nhat Minh To

Ph.D. Student

Minh is interested in data structure and algorithms, machine learning, deep learning, signal, and image processing. He is currently a Ph.D. Student in Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of British Columbia. He is fluent in Matlab, Python, C#.

Hooman Vaseli

Ph.D. Student

Ph.D. Student
Electrical and Computer Engineering

Andrew Xie

Undergraduate engineering student