Harini Veeraraghavan

Harini Veeraraghavan is an Associate Professor at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSKCC), affiliated with the Weill Cornell Medicine Graduate School of Medical Sciences in the Biomedical Imaging program. She leads a research laboratory focused on developing and translating artificial intelligence methodologies for cancer treatment monitoring and personalized therapy.

Dr. Veeraraghavan's research centers on developing automated AI methods to analyze medical images for extracting and combining relevant information from serial imaging to predict cancer treatment outcomes. Her work combines computer vision and advanced machine learning techniques to segment cancers, monitor treatment response, and detect early cancer treatment resistance by analyzing longitudinal CT and MRI images. She has developed novel deep learning-based deformable image registration methods to address challenges in radiotherapy, including estimating radiation dose delivery and creating virtual digital twins of patients. Her research also investigates bias in AI models and develops fair AI approaches considering patient demographics.

Her laboratory has produced several groundbreaking AI models that have been clinically implemented at MSK since 2019, including cross-modality distillation for lung tumor segmentation, the self-supervised masked image transformer (SMIT) for organ segmentation from brain to pelvis, and the ProRSeg method for modeling anatomical deformations during radiation treatment. These models have been used in over 15,000 treatment courses.

• Chair of Joint Working Group Research Seed Funding Initiative at the American Association of Medical Physicists
• Associate Editor for Medical Physics and International Journal for Radiation Oncology, Biology, Physics
• "Best in Physics" awards (2013, 2018)
• Research excellence awards in Medical Physics department (2020, 2022)
• R01 awards for AI methods in lung cancer safety and virtual digital twins for pancreatic cancer treatment

Dr. Veeraraghavan received her PhD in Computer Science from the University of Minnesota in 2006, followed by postdoctoral work at Carnegie Mellon University. She previously worked as a computer vision scientist at General Electric Research before joining MSK, where she has focused on clinically translating AI methods for radiation therapy planning and cancer treatment monitoring.