NEW YORK (TIP): Prateek Prasanna, an Indian American professor has received the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER Award for his project to harness eye gaze data as a key resource for guiding model learning.

Prasanna, an assistant professor from the Department of Biomedical Informatics at Stony Brook University, aims to integrate how radiologists and pathologists visually interpret medical images with artificial intelligence.

Titled “CAREER: Towards Gaze-guided Medical Image Analysis,” the project will enhance the interpretability and diagnostic performance of machine learning systems in both radiology and digital pathology, according to a university release.

The award recognizes Prasanna’s innovative approach to bridging human expertise and artificial intelligence in service of better healthcare outcomes. “I’m thrilled to receive the NSF CAREER award to advance AI for medical image interpretation. This support will help us build models that learn from the way expert clinicians see, think, and reason,” said Prasanna. “By integrating how experts visually navigate complex medical images, particularly through their gaze patterns, we hope to improve both the accuracy and interpretability of AI-driven diagnostic tools.”

“Our work not only advances the science of human-AI collaboration but also has the potential to transform training, decision-making, and patient care across a wide range of clinical applications,” he said. “By embedding clinical expertise into model development, we aim to build AI tools that are not only technically robust but also clinically meaningful.”

Prasanna leads the Imaging Informatics for Precision Medicine (IMAGINE) Lab at Stony Brook University, where his team focuses on developing clinically translatable machine learning tools that integrate imaging, pathology and genomic data to inform treatment decisions.

A key focus of the lab is combining machine-generated insights with expert clinical interpretations to enhance diagnostic workflows.  The lab also conducts research in interpretable and explainable AI, with an emphasis on discovering computational biomarkers in settings where data is scarce or incomplete. Their work spans both oncology and non-oncology domains and is regularly published in leading technical and clinical venues.

The CAREER project’s education initiatives span mentoring trainees through hands-on research experiences, coursework, and clinical collaborations.

Prasanna will also lead curriculum development efforts, such as the SBU Radiology Informatics Microcredential Program, to train future-ready practitioners and foster meaningful dialogue between engineers and clinicians.

“We are proud to celebrate Dr. Prateek Prasanna for receiving the NSF CAREER Award, one of the National Science Foundation’s highest honors for early-career faculty. This award recognizes Dr. Prasanna’s promise as a leader in integrating cutting-edge research with transformative education in biomedical informatics and AI-driven healthcare solutions,” said Joel Saltz, founding chair of the Department of Biomedical Informatics.

“In addition to the CAREER Award, Dr. Prasanna was recently awarded an NIH R03 grant in collaboration with the School of Dental Medicine — an interdisciplinary project that emerged directly from connections formed during a bootcamp facilitated by Stony Brook’s Institute for Engineering-Driven Medicine, which organizes a variety of collaborative workshops, bootcamps and training initiatives.” Prasanna earned his PhD in Biomedical Engineering from Case Western Reserve University, his MS in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Rutgers University, and his BTech in Electrical and Electronics Engineering from the National Institute of Technology in Calicut, India.

Prasanna’s research focuses on building clinically translatable machine learning tools that leverage multiple data streams of imaging, pathology, and genomics to derive actionable insights for enabling better treatment decisions. His research involving the development of companion diagnostic tools for thoracic, neuro, and breast imaging applications has won several innovation awards.