Ricky-Taira,-PhD--
rtaira@ucla.edu
(310) 794-3535
Office Info

924 Westwood Blvd, Suite 420, Room A

Ricky Taira, PhD

Professor, Department of Radiological Sciences

BIOGRAPHY

Dr. Ricky Taira obtained his Bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering in 1982, and went on to receive a PhD in biomedical physics in 1988 from UCLA. He is now a Professor in the Department of Radiological Sciences at UCLA’s David Geffen School of Medicine. His past research interests have included picture archive and communication systems (PACS), medical knowledge bases (the KMeD project) for intelligent patient case retrieval, and structuring clinical observations for disease modeling. Currently, his main research focus is on developing a cognitively inspired natural language processing system (NLP) for clinical reports. He is the co-PI and investigator of several NIH-funded grants. Dr. Taira is the UCLA site PI for a telemedicine screening grant for diabetic retinopathy in collaboration with Charles Drew University and the Los Angeles County of Health Services. Dr. Taira teaches courses in medical knowledge representation and medical imaging informatics that are part of the UCLA Medical and Imaging Informatics interdisciplinary training program.

Publications

2018
Garcia-Gathright JI, Matiasz NJ, Adame C, Sarma KV, Sauer L, Smedley NF, Spiegel ML, Strunck J, Garon EB, Taira RK, Aberle DR, Bui AAT. Evaluating Casama: Contextualized semantic maps for summarization of lung cancer studies. Comput Biol Med. 2018 Jan 1;92:55-63. DOI: 10.1016/j.compbiomed.2017.10.034. Epub 2017 Nov 3. PMID: 29149658; PMCID: PMC5762403.
2017
Rios Piedra EAR, Ellingson B, El-Saden S, Taira RK, Bui AAT, Hsu W. Measuring Tumor Boundary Variability to Improve Automated Segmentation of Brain Tumors Using Multimodal MRI. Poster presented at International Society for Magnetic Resonance in Medicine (ISMRM). 2017. Rios Piedra EAR, Ellingson B, Cloughesy T, Taira RK, El-Saden S, Bui AAT, Hsu W. Hybrid Hierarchical Model for Lung Cancer Prediction. International Symposium on Biomedical Imaging (ISBI). 2017. Rios Piedra EAR, Orosz I, Zide M, El-Saden S, Taira RK, Bui AAT, Hsu W. A Usability Study to Evaluate the Impact of a Novel Automated Brain Tumor Assessment Application. Poster presented at American Medical Informatics Association. 2017.
2016
Morioka C, Meng F, Taira R, Sayre J, Zimmerman P, Ishimitsu D, Huang J, Shen L, El-Saden S. Automatic Classification of Ultrasound Screening Examinations of the Abdominal Aorta. J Digit Imaging. 2016 Dec;29(6):742-748. doi: 10.1007/s10278-016-9889-6. PMID: 27400914; PMCID: PMC5114229. Tong M, Hsu W, Taira RK. A visualization for clinical trial reports: A usability study. AMIA Annu Symp Proc. Chicago, IL; 2016. Rios Piedra EAR, Taira RK, El-Saden S, Ellingson BM, Bui AAT, Hsu W. GlioView: An application that visualizes variability in brain tumor segmentation to inform the clinical assessment of change. 2016 Annual Meeting of the Radiological Society of North America. Chicago, IL; 2016. Hsu W, El-Saden S, Taira RK. Medical Imaging Informatics. In: Shen B, Tang H, Jiang X, editors. Translational Biomedical Informatics: A Precision Medicine Perspective. Singapore: Springer; 2016. Rios Piedra EAR, Taira RK, El-Saden S, Ellingson BM, Bui AAT, Hsu W. Assessing Variability in Brain Tumor Segmentation to Improve Volumetric Accuracy and Characterization of Change. IEEE EMBS Int Conf Biomed Health Inform. 2016 Feb;2016:380-383. DOI: 10.1109/BHI.2016.7455914. Epub 2016 Apr 21. PMID: 28670648; PMCID: PMC5489257. Rios Piedra EAR, Taira RK, El-Saden S, Ellingson BM, Bui AAT, Hsu W. Assessing Variability in Brain Tumor Segmentation to Improve Volumetric Accuracy and Characterization of Change. IEEE EMBS Int Conf Biomed Health Inform. 2016 Feb;2016:380-383. DOI: 10.1109/BHI.2016.7455914. Epub 2016 Apr 21. PMID: 28670648; PMCID: PMC5489257.

Research Projects