In this episode I talked with co-founders Natasha Leporé and Niharika Gajawelli of the startup Voxel Healthcare. Their MD in that space, Justin Low, also joined us.
Natasha Leporé is one of the founders and the CTO of Voxel Healthcare, where we develop software to automate clinicians’ tasks and provide quantitative assessment of medical images to help in their daily functions. They focus particularly on clinical software for radiologists and radiation oncologists to help assess children's brain magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). She is also an Associate Professor at the University of Southern California, and my laboratory, the Computational Imaging of Brain Organization Research Group (CIBORG), specializes in mathematical and numerical methods to study brain anatomy and function through MRI. These methods are applied to furthering our understanding of different neurological disorders, as well as normal and abnormal brain development. They span all ages from before birth at the fetal stages to elderly adults and every age in between. She graduated with a Bsc in physics and mathematics from the University of Montreal and then obtained a masters in applied mathematics from Cambridge University, in general relativity. Her PhD is in theoretical physics (Harvard University), and deals with quantum chaos in quantum billiards living on the plane and the pseudosphere. Afterward, she switched to neuroimaging and became a postdoctoral fellow at the Laboratory of Neuro Imaging.
Niharika Gajawelli completed her PhD in Biomedical engineering with Natasha as her advisor and specialized in analyzing brain development in early childhood using brain MRI data, as part of the CIBORG lab at Children's Hospital Los Angeles. Her focus is medical imaging in general, but she continues to be fascinated by MRI and that we can acquire so much information about our body non-invasively. She is also interested in data science and deep learning, and this was one of her motivations to work at Voxel Healthcare and develop software that would be useful in radiology and radiation oncology. Being in a start-up has been an eye-opening experience as it involves many aspects of developing a product, including pitching to potential investors, understanding the FDA regulation pathways, assessing the business strategies, as well as the technical aspects of the product.
Justin graduated from medical school in May of 2019 from the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio with a focus on research in Radiation Oncology. He has been with CHLA since 2018 and continued with his research after graduating from medical school. He currently working on a NIH grant funded project that is looking at the prevalence of secondary malignancies in proton vs photon radiation treatment. In August of 2021 he joined Voxel to help head the medical and technological aspects of the software being developed by Voxel. He is currently obtaining a masters in health administration as well.
https://www.voxelhealthcare.com
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