About
I build machine learning that reads wounds, scans and patient records, and I take health products through regulation and clinical trials to the people who need them.
Story
The short version
Data in, better care out
I teach computers to read medical data. Then I do the part most people skip: getting the result through ethics boards, regulators, trials and supply chains, so it actually reaches a patient.
2015
It started with brains
My master's at the University of Calgary was a hunt for tiny changes in the brain that standard MRI misses in people with epilepsy. I built a sharper way to measure them, then flew to Campinas, Brazil, to run it on other hospitals' scanners. Along the way I combed through records from 1,000 epilepsy patients and found that one in six never shows the classic warning spike on EEG.
2018
Then it moved to the feet
At the Zivot Limb Preservation Centre in Calgary I met the wound that changed my direction: the diabetic foot ulcer. One that will not heal can cost someone a leg. When we ran the numbers, the clinic's team-based care was linked to 45% fewer major amputations than a matched city without it. That was the moment I saw data save limbs.
2019
Teaching AI to look at wounds
For my PhD at the University of Toronto I built the Zivot dataset, thousands of wound photos with matching heat and depth scans, and taught AI to use it. My models find ulcers, judge which healing phase they are in, forecast the next visit, and describe a wound in plain clinical words (UlcerGPT). One even dreams up synthetic wounds that clinicians took for real 70% of the time.
Now
Closing the gap to the clinic
Great ideas often die between the lab and the bedside, so that is where I work now. MedProactive runs clinical trials for sponsors, with budgets approaching $1M. Kanjin Health, which I co-founded, brings medical devices into Canada under a Health Canada licence. And I help Own Health design AI-assisted care for people with complex needs.
Quick facts
- Based in Toronto, Canada
- Speaks English and Farsi
- Invited speaker at ECML PKDD 2023 in Turin, Italy
- Certified in Good Clinical Practice and as a Clinical Research Coordinator (CITI, Canada)
- Once a patient care volunteer at Alberta Children's Hospital
Education
PhD, Biomedical Engineering
University of Toronto, 2019 to 2025
Thesis: Multimodal artificial intelligence system to enhance the classification and analysis of diabetic foot ulcer healing conditions.
Supervised by Milos R. Popovic and Shehroz S. Khan
MSc, Biomedical Engineering
University of Calgary, 2015 to 2017
Quantitative MRI for temporal lobe epilepsy.
Supervised by R. Marc Lebel and Paolo Federico
BSc, Bioengineering
University of Maryland, College Park, 2010 to 2014
Certifications
- Good Clinical Practice (GCP), Canada, refresher. CITI Program, 2026 to 2029
- Good Clinical Practice (GCP), Canada. CITI Program, 2025 to 2028
- Clinical Research Coordinator (CRC), Canada. CITI Program, 2025
Awards and funding
| Award | Years | Value |
|---|---|---|
| Alexander Graham Bell Canada Graduate Scholarship, Doctoral (NSERC) | 2021 to 2024 | $105,000 |
| Zivot Limb Preservation Research Grant | 2019 | $40,000 |
| NSERC CREATE I3T Scholarship | 2016 to 2017 | $30,000 |
| Ontario Graduate Scholarship | 2020 to 2021 | $15,000 |
| AGE-WELL Award in Technology and Aging | 2020 to 2021 | $15,000 |
| Toronto Rehab Institute Student Scholarship | 2020 to 2021 | $9,000 |
| University of Toronto Fellowship | 2019 to 2021 | $9,000 |
| University of Calgary Faculty of Graduate Studies Award | 2016 | $5,000 |
| Biomedical Engineering Internal Award, University of Toronto | 2020 to 2021 | $3,000 |
| ICAIR Best Poster Award, University Health Network | 2023 | |
| Amii Upper Bound Talent Bursary | 2023 | |
| T-CAIREM Abstract Competition | 2024 |
Teaching
- BME205, Foundations of Biomedical Engineering. University of Toronto, 2023 to 2025
- BME1478, Coding for Biomedical Engineers. University of Toronto, 2023 to 2025
Talks
- Synthesizing diabetic foot ulcer images with diffusion models (invited). European Conference on Machine Learning (ECML PKDD), Turin, Italy, 2023
Peer review
Reviewer for IEEE Journal of Biomedical and Health Informatics; IEEE Transactions on Human-Machine Systems; IEEE Access; BioMedical Engineering OnLine; IJCAI 2026 workshop on AI for Aging, Rehabilitation and Intelligent Assisted Living (ARIAL).
Service
- Communications lead, KITE Trainee Executive Committee. Toronto Rehab, University Health Network, 2019 to 2022
- Member, Equity, Diversity and Inclusion Committee. KITE Research Institute, 2020 to 2021
- Patient care volunteer (ENT, cleft palate, urology and nephrology clinics). Alberta Children's Hospital, Calgary, 2015 to 2017
Languages: English and Farsi.