24 février 2020, 16 h, au pavillon Roger-Gaudry, salle M-415

Inscription gratuite et obligatoire (pizza servie après les conférences)

Conférence de Reza Forghani

Artificial Intelligence Applications in Healthcare and Life Sciences: Pushing the Boundaries

There is great interest in applications of AI in life sciences and especially in healthcare. Although this technology has great potential for future transformation of healthcare processes, there are major basic and structural barriers in our healthcare system and research processes that need to be recognized and overcome for successful research and development and especially development of AI applications that will be adopted and can succeed in clinical practice. In this presentation, I will provide an overview of the Augmented Intelligence & Precision Health Laboratory’s vision for a multi-disciplinary collaborative facility to help accelerate development and implementation of different medical AI tools. This will include a high-level discussion of structural challenges, opportunities, as well as some of the major projects and initiatives being undertaken by the laboratory.  

Dr. Reza Forghani completed his MD/PhD degree at McGill University, with the PhD in molecular and cell biology. Before training in diagnostic radiology, Dr. Forghani completed a residency in family medicine and had experience practicing in the emergency, hospital, and critical care settings. He completed a diagnostic radiology residency at McGill in 2008 followed by a 2-year fellowship in Neuroradiology at the Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School. He then returned to Montreal where he started his clinical practice at the Jewish General Hospital and subsequently transferred his clinical practice to McGill University Health Centre. Dr. Forghani is a FRQS supported clinician scientist and is a director of the Augmented Intelligence & Precision Health Laboratory of the MUHC, where the main interests are artificial intelligence applications in healthcare in addition to research in different advanced imaging applications. The research projects lead at the AIPHL lab are multidisciplinary with team members with clinical expertise, computer science, and machine learning expertise, and expertise from other areas of basic and life sciences. Dr. Forghani has multi-disciplinary collaborations both within the MUHC and with outside groups.

Conférence de Mathieu Blanchette

Learning from watching genomes evolve

The genomes of more than one hundred vertebrate genomes are now largely sequenced. How can one make use of this massive amount of evolutionary information to better understand the origin and function of portions of the human genome? In this talk, I will first discuss how the genomes of ancestral mammalian species can be reconstructed with surprisingly high accuracy from the genomes of extant species. I will then present how inferred ancestral sequences can be used to improve the detection of ancient evolutionary events such as transposable element and pseudogene insertions that have shaped mammalian genomes. Finally, I will then introduce algorithmic and machine learning approaches that make use of inferred ancestral DNA sequences to improve the accuracy of transcription factor binding site and micro-RNA target site prediction. 

Mathieu Blanchette completed his Ph.D. (U. of Washington, 2002) and postdoc (UC Santa Cruz, 2003), Mathieu Blanchette joined the School of Computer Science at McGill and founded the Computational Genomics Lab. His work focusses on the development of algorithmic and machine learning approaches to study molecular biology and evolution. The research made by his team has been published in more than 70 publications and has been cited more than 8000 times. Recently elected member of the College of Scholar of the Canadian Royal Society, he was a Sloan Fellow (2009), and received the Outstanding Young Computer Scientist Researcher Prize from the Canadian Association for Computer Science (2012), and the Chris Overton prize (2006). His work is funded by NSERC, Genome Canada, CIHR, and FRQNT. He loves teaching and supervising students, and received the Leo Yaffe prize for teaching (2008).