Radiology portal AuntMinnie.com, which is part of the Science and Medicine Group, has announced the winners of the 2021 edition of the Minnies awards. The awards is an annual event recognizing excellence in medical imaging.
This year, Dr. Judy Gichoya of Emory University received the award for the Most Influential Radiology Researcher.
From her days as a medical student at Moi Teaching and Referral Hospital, Dr. Judy Gichoya has been interested in researching the impact of information technology (IT) on the practice of medicine.
After earning her medical degree at Moi, she served for one year as a medical officer at a hospital outside Nairobi. This is where she began considering the impact that IT tools could have on care delivery through programs such as clinical decision support for physicians treating individuals with HIV/AIDS.
Gichoya continued her focus on imaging informatics during her residency, which took place at a time when many medical students were avoiding radiology due to concerns about artificial intelligence (AI) potentially taking their jobs.
Gichoya is an advocate for what she calls village mentoring or hive learning, in which people from multiple disparate disciplines are brought together to work on a problem. This can include researchers from different universities and even different continents.
One of her current projects is one that’s funded by the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) to develop an Open Data Science Platform that will help harness the use of informatics to improve healthcare in Africa. The project is intended to develop a cloud-based data sharing platform that will be used to spur discovery and innovation in healthcare on the continent.
Other winners include Dr. Tessa Cook for Most Effective Radiology Educator, Sharon Mohammed for Most Effective Radiologic Sciences Educator and Patricia Richards, for Most Effective Radiology Administrator/Manager.
Now in its 22nd year, the Minnies awards enable medical imaging specialists to acknowledge the contributions of their peers to the field of radiology.
Minnies candidates are nominated by members of AuntMinnie.com, and winners are chosen by a panel of radiology experts after two rounds of voting. The awards has 15 categories including the Most Influential Radiology Researcher and Best New Radiology Device.
The 15 categories are
- Most Influential Radiology Researcher
- Most Effective Radiology Educator
- Most Effective Radiologic Sciences Educator
- Most Effective Radiology Administrator/Manager
- Best Radiologist Training Program
- Best Radiologic Sciences Training Program
- Most Significant News Event in Radiology
- Biggest Threat to Radiology
- Hottest Clinical Procedure
- Scientific Paper of the Year
- Best New Radiology Device
- Best New Radiology Software
- Best New Radiology Vendor
- Best Educational Mobile App
- Best Radiology Image