Title: Medicine and the matrix: Coming around a full circle in next generation healthcare

Speaker: Dr. Tavpritesh Sethi, CSIR Fourth Paradigm Institute

Abstract: The power of data to drive discoveries in science has been a major revelation of the past decade. A major revolution is anticipated in healthcare delivery, consumership and education and I will illustrate casestudies in Computational Biomedicine taken from my previous work in this direction. A common theme in these pieces would be the use of analytics for enabling medical and public health advances. A second underlying theme would be the discovery and use of approaches which recapitulate biological principles. This is because analytics is not enough and the “bridging” crossdisciplinary understanding is necessary. This immersive understanding which acts a thesaurus for translating concepts across medical and computational disciplines could be vital for creating breakthroughs. I would also discuss my current and future projects and would highlight the potential areas for crossdisciplinary collaborations especially on the challenging work on forecasting Sepsis, a major killer in the Pediatric Intensive Care Units.

Bio: Dr. Tavpritesh Sethi is a Physician and a Data Scientist at CSIR Fourth Paradigm Institute's Biomedical Unit situated at Institute of Genomics and Integrative Biology (IGIB), Delhi. While finishing medical school he developed a deep interest in complex physiology of health and its derangement in diseases. This was the overarching theme of his Ph.D. work at IGIB. Working at the interface of Medicine, computer science and genomics he addressed the physiology of lungs and autonomic function. His work continues to have a strong focus on translating theoretical understanding into enabling technologies and he developed a novel exquisitely sensitive marker of small airway diseases such as asthma for which was one of the winning entries in MITIndia Young Innovator Award, 2013. This technology is now planned to be integrated into a handheld device for clinical and research use. Although he spends most of his time in data analytics, he maintains his clinical roots and works closely with the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS). He was recently awarded the Wellcome Trust India Alliance Fellowship for joining AIIMS and leading a project on clinical decision support using Big Data for Intensive Care Units. He has planned to intensively collaborate with IITDelhi and Stanford School of Medicine for this work. His other current line of work is in integrative analysis of multi-dimensional public health data and he is enthusiastic about disruptive education in Medical and Public Health disciplines.