Ronald Marc Summers is an American radiologist and senior investigator at the Diagnostic Radiology Department at the
NIH Clinical Center
The NIH Clinical Center is a hospital solely dedicated to clinical research at the National Institutes of Health campus in Bethesda, Maryland. The Clinical Center, known as Building 10, consists of the original part of the hospital, the Warren Gr ...
in
Bethesda,
Maryland
Maryland ( ) is a U.S. state, state in the Mid-Atlantic (United States), Mid-Atlantic region of the United States. It shares borders with Virginia, West Virginia, and the District of Columbia to its south and west; Pennsylvania to its north; ...
. He is chief of the Clinical Image Processing Service and directs the Imaging Biomarkers and Computer-Aided Diagnosis (CAD) Laboratory. A researcher in the field of radiology and
computer-aided diagnosis
Computer-aided detection (CADe), also called computer-aided diagnosis (CADx), are systems that assist doctors in the interpretation of medical images. Imaging techniques in X-ray, MRI, Endoscopy, and ultrasound diagnostics yield a great deal of ...
, he has co-authored over 500 journal articles and conference proceedings papers and is a coinventor on 12 patents.
His lab has conducted research applying
artificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence (AI) is intelligence—perceiving, synthesizing, and inferring information—demonstrated by machines, as opposed to intelligence displayed by animals and humans. Example tasks in which this is done include speech r ...
and
deep learning to
radiology
Radiology ( ) is the medical discipline that uses medical imaging to diagnose diseases and guide their treatment, within the bodies of humans and other animals. It began with radiography (which is why its name has a root referring to radiati ...
.
Background
Summers received his B.A. degree in physics from the University of Pennsylvania in 1981, where he also obtained his M.D. and Ph.D. degrees in Medicine/Anatomy & Cell Biology in 1988.
He completed a medical internship at the
Penn Presbyterian Medical Center
Penn Presbyterian Medical Center ("Presby") is a hospital located in the University City section of West Philadelphia. It was founded bReverend Ephraim D. Saundersin 1871 and formally joined the University of Pennsylvania Health System in 1995. ...
in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, a radiology residency at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI (1989–1993) and an MRI fellowship at Duke University, Durham, NC (1993–1994).
Research
Summers' lab is known for developing software for "virtual colonoscopy" and computer aided detection (CAD) algorithms which assist in the detection of colon polyps. His lab is also known for multi-organ multi-atlas registration and the development of large radiologic image databases. Summers is also a practicing clinician – his clinical areas of specialty are thoracic and gastrointestinal radiology and body cross-sectional imaging.
[ ]
Summers' lab is known for pioneering work in the application of
deep learning to problems in medical imaging such as computer aided detection, classification, and segmentation. A February 2016 paper from his lab exploring convolutional neural network architectures and
transfer learning
Transfer learning (TL) is a research problem in machine learning (ML) that focuses on storing knowledge gained while solving one problem and applying it to a different but related problem. For example, knowledge gained while learning to recognize ...
for lymph node detection and interstitial lung disease classification had over 1,000 citations as of early 2019. In 2018 he was the keynote speaker at the inaugural Medical Imaging and Deep Learning (MIDL) conference.
In September 2017 his lab released 100,000 anonymized chest x-ray images from 30,000 patients, including many with advanced lung disease.
In July 2018, his lab released ''DeepLesion'', a dataset of 32,000 annotated lesions identified on CT images spread over 4,400 patients.
At the 2019
IEEE
The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) is a 501(c)(3) professional association for electronic engineering and electrical engineering (and associated disciplines) with its corporate office in New York City and its operati ...
Symposium on Biomedical Imaging (ISBI) Youbao Tang, a postdoc in Summers' lab, unveiled a universal lesion detector (nicknamed "ULDor") which uses a mask R-CNN architecture to detect many types of lesions throughout the body with high precision.
In 2019 his lab has demonstrated how to generate weak labels from clinically generated medical reports using deep learning and natural language processing techniques, thus greatly reducing the need for burdensome hand annotation of datasets.
Summers and collaborators have also developed a tool for opportunistic fully automated bone mineral density (BMD) measurement in CT scans which has been used to track BMD changes in large longitudinal cohorts. Together with Perry Pickhardt and collaborators, the tool was used to track bone mineral density changes in 20,000 subjects. Summers' lab has also demonstrated the utility of deep learning for performing automated measurement of muscle, liver fat, vertebral levels, and plaque in large datasets. A 2022 paper from Summers' lab published in ''Radiology'' showed how computed tomography (CT) biomarkers are associated with diabetes and pre-diabetes.
Summers has served as a member of the editorial boards of the journals ''Radiology: Artificial Intelligence'', ''Journal of Medical Imaging'', and ''Academic Radiology'' and is a Fellow of the Society of Abdominal Radiologists and the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE).
Awards
*
Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers
The Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) is the highest honor bestowed by the United States government on outstanding scientists and engineers in the early stages of their independent research careers. The White ...
, 1999
* NIH Director's Award, 2012
References
{{DEFAULTSORT:Summers, Ronald
Living people
National Institutes of Health faculty
American radiologists
Date of birth missing (living people)
University of Pennsylvania alumni
Year of birth missing (living people)
University of Michigan people
Recipients of the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers