David J. Foran, PhD

Chief Informatics Officer and Executive Director of Biomedical Informatics and Computational Imaging, Rutgers Cancer Institute of New Jersey;

Chief Research Informatics Officer, Rutgers Health

Rutgers Cancer Institute of New Jersey, 195 Little Albany Street, New Brunswick, NJ 08901

(732) 235-6925
foran@cinj.rutgers.edu

Academic Appointment

Positions

Dr. Foran is CIO and Executive Director of Computational Imaging & Biomedical informatics at Rutgers Cancer Institute of New Jersey and serves as Professor and Chief of Medical Informatics for the departments of Pathology & Laboratory Medicine and Radiology at Rutgers-Robert Wood Johnson Medical School. He also serves as Chief Research Informatics Officer for Rutgers Biomedical and Health Sciences. His research focuses on the design, development, and implementation of new approaches in computer-assisted diagnostics, medical imaging, precision medicine and machine-learning for resolving challenging clinical problems in pathology, radiology, and oncology.

He has served as a speaker and session chair for the IEEE international conferences for the engineering in medicine and biology society (EMBS); as the director and session chair for the scientific program for the annual conferences of the national Association for Pathology Informatics (API); as an invited speaker for the American Society for Investigative Pathology (ASIP); as an organizer and session chair for the World Conference on Medical Physics and Biomedical Engineering and the MICCAI International Workshop on High-Performance and Distributed Computing for Medical Imaging. Dr. Foran served as a charter member on the Biomedical Computing and Health Informatics (BCHI) study section at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). In 2014, he became a standing member for the Biodata Management and Analysis (BDMA) Study Section for the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering at NIH. He has served as a consultant to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA); and currently serves as an Associate Editor for the journal on Cancer Informatics; as an Associate Editor Journal of Pathology Informatics; and as a reviewer for the American Medical Informatics Association; BMC Cancer; Archives in Pathology and Laboratory Medicine; the IEEE Transactions on Information Technology in Biomedicine; and the IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging.

A major concentration for his laboratory has been the development of a family of data-mining, imaging and computational tools for characterizing the morphologic profiles exhibited by a wide range of malignancies and elucidating the role that protein and molecular expression plays in disease onset and progression. This research has led to the development of:

1. An image-guided screening system for discriminating among commonly confused malignant lymphomas and leukemia
2. A robotic system for performing automated imaging, evaluation, and archiving of tissue microarrays
3. An automated means for 3-D detection, characterization, and tracking of hepatic neoplasms from spiral CT
4. A new approach for characterizing neuroanatomy from MR images using mathematical morphometry and cluster analysis
5. A high-throughput, grid-enabled decision support system for performing quick, reliable comparative analysis and classification of expression patterns in imaged cancer tissue microarrays and pathology specimens

This work has resulted in numerous publications, invited book chapters and several pending and issued patents. Dr. Foran’s research has been funded by the Whitaker Foundation, the NJ Commission on Science & Technology, the federal Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the Department of Defense (DoD), the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, the Radiological Society of North America, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the private sector.