Ronald Summers

Ronald Marc Summers is an American radiologist

and senior investigator at the Diagnostic Radiology Ronald M. Summers
Department at the NIH Clinical Center in Bethesda, Citizenship USA
Maryland. He is chief of the Clinical Image Processing Alma mater University of Pennsylvania
Service and directs the Imaging Biomarkers and Known for CT Colonography, deep learning
Computer-Aided Diagnosis (CAD) Laboratory. A in radiology
researcher in the field of radiology and computer-aided
Scientific career
diagnosis, he has co-authored over 500 journal articles
and conference proceedings papers and is a coinventor Institutions NIH
on 12 patents.[1] His lab has conducted research
applying artificial intelligence and deep learning to radiology.[2][3][4]

Background
Summers received his B.A. degree in physics from the University of Pennsylvania in 1981, where he also
obtained his M.D. and Ph.D. degrees in Medicine/Anatomy & Cell Biology in 1988.[5] He completed a
medical internship at the Penn Presbyterian Medical Center in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, a radiology
residency at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI (1989–1993) and an MRI fellowship at Duke
University, Durham, NC (1993–1994).[6]

Research
Summers' lab is known for developing software for "virtual colonoscopy" and computer aided detection
(CAD) algorithms which assist in the detection of colon polyps.[7] His lab is also known for multi-organ
multi-atlas registration and the development of large radiologic image databases. Summers is also a
practicing clinician – his clinical areas of specialty are thoracic and gastrointestinal radiology and body
cross-sectional imaging.[6]

Summers' lab is known for pioneering work in the application of deep learning to problems in medical
imaging such as computer aided detection, classification, and segmentation. A February 2016 paper from
his lab exploring convolutional neural network architectures and transfer learning for lymph node
detection and interstitial lung disease classification had over 1,000 citations as of early 2019.[8] In 2018
he was the keynote speaker at the inaugural Medical Imaging and Deep Learning (MIDL) conference.[9]

In September 2017 his lab released 100,000 anonymized chest x-ray images from 30,000 patients,
including many with advanced lung disease.[10][11]

In July 2018, his lab released DeepLesion, a dataset of 32,000 annotated lesions identified on CT images
spread over 4,400 patients.[12][13][14][15] At the 2019 IEEE Symposium on Biomedical Imaging (ISBI)
Youbao Tang, a postdoc in Summers' lab, unveiled a universal lesion detector (nicknamed "ULDor")
which uses a mask R-CNN architecture to detect many types of lesions throughout the body with high
precision.[16]

In 2019 his lab has demonstrated how to generate weak labels from clinically generated medical reports
using deep learning and natural language processing techniques, thus greatly reducing the need for
burdensome hand annotation of datasets.[17]

Summers and collaborators have also developed a tool for opportunistic fully automated bone mineral
density (BMD) measurement in CT scans which has been used to track BMD changes in large
longitudinal cohorts.[18][19] Together with Perry Pickhardt and collaborators, the tool was used to track
bone mineral density changes in 20,000 subjects.[20][21] Summers' lab has also demonstrated the utility of
deep learning for performing automated measurement of muscle,[22] liver fat,[23] vertebral levels,[24] and
plaque in large datasets.[25] A 2022 paper from Summers' lab published in Radiology showed how
computed tomography (CT) biomarkers are associated with diabetes and pre-diabetes.[26][27]

Summers has served as a member of the editorial boards of the journals Radiology: Artificial Intelligence,
Journal of Medical Imaging, and Academic Radiology and is a Fellow of the Society of Abdominal
Radiologists and the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE).[6]

Awards
Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, 1999
NIH Director's Award, 2012

References
1. "Ronald M. Summers, MD, PhD" (https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=j4cvq80AAAAJ
&hl=en). scholar.google.com. Google Scholar Citations. Retrieved 21 December 2018.
2. Pearson, Dave (1 July 2016). "Radiologists sharing more abdominal duties with computers"
(https://www.healthimaging.com/topics/imaging-informatics/radiologists-sharing-more-abdo
minal-duties-computers). Health Imaging. Retrieved 22 December 2018.
3. "Doctor Data: How Computers Are Invading the Clinic" (https://irp.nih.gov/blog/post/2018/08/
doctor-data-how-computers-are-invading-the-clinic). NIH Intramural Research Program. 2
August 2018. Retrieved 22 December 2018.
4. "Share Your Science: The Impact of Deep Learning on Radiology" (https://news.developer.n
vidia.com/share-your-science-the-impact-of-deep-learning-on-radiology/). NVIDIA Developer
News Center. 13 December 2016. Retrieved 21 December 2018.
5. "NIH Clinical Center: Curriculum Vitae for Ronald M. Summers, MD, PhD" (https://www.cc.ni
h.gov/drd/summers.html). www.cc.nih.gov. Retrieved 21 December 2018.
6. "NIH Clinical Center Senior Staff" (http://www.cc.nih.gov/about/SeniorStaff/ronald_summers.
html). NIH Clinical Center. Retrieved 24 December 2018. This article incorporates text
from this source, which is in the public domain.
 7. Summers, Ronald M.; Yao, Jianhua; Pickhardt, Perry J.; Franaszek, Marek; Bitter, Ingmar;
Brickman, Daniel; Krishna, Vamsi; Choi, J. Richard (December 2005). "Computed
Tomographic Virtual Colonoscopy Computer-Aided Polyp Detection in a Screening
Population" (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1576342). Gastroenterology.
129 (6): 1832–1844. doi:10.1053/j.gastro.2005.08.054 (https://doi.org/10.1053%2Fj.gastro.2
005.08.054). PMC 1576342 (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1576342).
PMID 16344052 (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16344052).
8. Shin, Hoo-Chang; Roth, Holger R.; Gao, Mingchen; Lu, Le; Xu, Ziyue; Nogues, Isabella;
Yao, Jianhua; Mollura, Daniel; Summers, Ronald M. (May 2016). "Deep Convolutional
Neural Networks for Computer-Aided Detection: CNN Architectures, Dataset Characteristics
and Transfer Learning" (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4890616). IEEE
Transactions on Medical Imaging. 35 (5): 1285–1298. arXiv:1602.03409 (https://arxiv.org/ab
s/1602.03409). Bibcode:2016arXiv160203409S (https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2016arXi
v160203409S). doi:10.1109/TMI.2016.2528162 (https://doi.org/10.1109%2FTMI.2016.2528
162). PMC 4890616 (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4890616).
PMID 26886976 (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26886976).
9. "MIDL2018, Day 1: Keynote by Prof. Ronald Summers" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=
_hqT3cS4aa0). YouTube. 18 July 2018. Retrieved 22 December 2018.
10. "NIH Clinical Center provides one of the largest publicly available chest x-ray datasets to
scientific community" (https://www.nih.gov/news-events/news-releases/nih-clinical-center-pr
ovides-one-largest-publicly-available-chest-x-ray-datasets-scientific-community). National
Institutes of Health (NIH). 27 September 2017. Retrieved 22 December 2018.
11. Wang X, Peng Y, Lu L, Lu Z, Bagheri M, Summers RM. ChestX-ray8: Hospital-scale Chest
X-ray Database and Benchmarks on Weakly-Supervised Classification and Localization of
Common Thorax Diseases (http://openaccess.thecvf.com/content_cvpr_2017/papers/Wang
_ChestX-ray8_Hospital-Scale_Chest_CVPR_2017_paper.pdf). IEEE CVPR 2017
12. "NIH Clinical Center releases dataset of 32,000 CT images" (https://www.nih.gov/news-even
ts/news-releases/nih-clinical-center-releases-dataset-32000-ct-images). National Institutes
of Health (NIH). 20 July 2018. Retrieved 22 December 2018.
13. "DeepLesion dataset" (https://nihcc.app.box.com/v/DeepLesion). Retrieved 22 December
2018.
14. Yan, Ke; Wang, Xiaosong; Lu, Le; Summers, Ronald M. (20 July 2018). "DeepLesion:
automated mining of large-scale lesion annotations and universal lesion detection with deep
learning" (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6052252). Journal of Medical
Imaging. 5 (3): 036501. doi:10.1117/1.JMI.5.3.036501 (https://doi.org/10.1117%2F1.JMI.5.
3.036501). PMC 6052252 (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6052252).
PMID 30035154 (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30035154).
15. Summers, Ronald M.; Bagheri, Mohammad Hadi; Harrison, Adam P.; Zhang, Ling; Lu, Le;
Wang, Xiaosong; Yan, Ke (2018). "Deep Lesion Graphs in the Wild: Relationship Learning
and Organization of Significant Radiology Image Findings in a Diverse Large-Scale Lesion
Database" (http://openaccess.thecvf.com/content_cvpr_2018/html/Yan_Deep_Lesion_Grap
hs_CVPR_2018_paper.html): 9261–9270. {{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires
|journal= (help)
16. Summers, Ronald M.; Xiao, Jing; Liu, Jiamin; Tang, Yuxing; Yan, Ke; Tang, Youbao (18
January 2019). "ULDor: A Universal Lesion Detector for CT Scans with Pseudo Masks and
Hard Negative Example Mining". arXiv:1901.06359 (https://arxiv.org/abs/1901.06359).
Bibcode:2019arXiv190106359T (https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2019arXiv190106359T).
{{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
17. Summers, Ronald M.; Lu, Zhiyong; Bagheri, Mohammadhadi; Sandfort, Veit; Peng, Yifan;
Yan, Ke (9 April 2019). "Holistic and Comprehensive Annotation of Clinically Significant
Findings on Diverse CT Images: Learning from Radiology Reports and Label Ontology".
arXiv:1904.04661 (https://arxiv.org/abs/1904.04661). Bibcode:2019arXiv190404661Y (http
s://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2019arXiv190404661Y). {{cite journal}}: Cite journal
requires |journal= (help)
18. Summers, Ronald M.; Baecher, Nicolai; Yao, Jianhua; Liu, Jiamin; Pickhardt, Perry J.; Choi,
J. Richard; Hill, Suvimol (March 2011). "Feasibility of Simultaneous Computed Tomographic
Colonography and Fully Automated Bone Mineral Densitometry in a Single Examination" (htt
ps://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3077119). Journal of Computer Assisted
Tomography. 35 (2): 212–216. doi:10.1097/RCT.0b013e3182032537 (https://doi.org/10.109
7%2FRCT.0b013e3182032537). PMC 3077119 (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/P
MC3077119). PMID 21412092 (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21412092).
19. Pickhardt, Perry J.; Lee, Scott J.; Liu, Jiamin; Yao, Jianhua; Lay, Nathan; Graffy, Peter M;
Summers, Ronald M (February 2019). "Population-based opportunistic osteoporosis
screening: Validation of a fully automated CT tool for assessing longitudinal BMD changes"
(https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6404831). The British Journal of Radiology.
92 (1094): 20180726. doi:10.1259/bjr.20180726 (https://doi.org/10.1259%2Fbjr.20180726).
PMC 6404831 (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6404831). PMID 30433815
(https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30433815).
20. Pearson, Dave (28 March 2019). "Opportunity emerges for osteoporosis screening via
routine CT" (https://www.healthimaging.com/topics/diagnostic-imaging/osteoporosis-screeni
ng-opportunity). Health Imaging. Retrieved 15 June 2019.
21. Jang, Samuel; Graffy, Peter M.; Ziemlewicz, Timothy J.; Lee, Scott J.; Summers, Ronald M.;
Pickhardt, Perry J. (May 2019). "Opportunistic Osteoporosis Screening at Routine
Abdominal and Thoracic CT: Normative L1 Trabecular Attenuation Values in More than 20
000 Adults" (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6492986). Radiology. 291 (2):
360–367. doi:10.1148/radiol.2019181648 (https://doi.org/10.1148%2Fradiol.2019181648).
PMC 6492986 (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6492986). PMID 30912719
(https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30912719).
22. Burns, Joseph E.; Yao, Jianhua; Chalhoub, Didier; Chen, Joseph J.; Summers, Ronald M.
(March 2020). "A Machine Learning Algorithm to Estimate Sarcopenia on Abdominal CT".
Academic Radiology. 27 (3): 311–320. doi:10.1016/j.acra.2019.03.011 (https://doi.org/10.10
16%2Fj.acra.2019.03.011). PMID 31126808 (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31126808).
S2CID 164219063 (https://api.semanticscholar.org/CorpusID:164219063).
23. Graffy, Peter M.; Sandfort, Veit; Summers, Ronald M.; Pickhardt, Perry J. (November 2019).
"Automated Liver Fat Quantification at Nonenhanced Abdominal CT for Population-based
Steatosis Assessment" (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6822771).
Radiology. 293 (2): 334–342. doi:10.1148/radiol.2019190512 (https://doi.org/10.1148%2Fra
diol.2019190512). PMC 6822771 (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6822771).
PMID 31526254 (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31526254).
24. Elton, Daniel; Sandfort, Veit; Pickhardt, Perry J.; Summers, Ronald M. (16 March 2020).
"Accurately identifying vertebral levels in large datasets". In Hahn, Horst K; Mazurowski,
Maciej A (eds.). Medical Imaging 2020: Computer-Aided Diagnosis. SPIE. p. 23.
arXiv:2001.10503 (https://arxiv.org/abs/2001.10503). doi:10.1117/12.2551247 (https://doi.or
g/10.1117%2F12.2551247). ISBN 9781510633957. S2CID 210932251 (https://api.semantic
scholar.org/CorpusID:210932251). {{cite book}}: |website= ignored (help)
25. Pickhardt, Perry J; Graffy, Peter M; Zea, Ryan; Lee, Scott J; Liu, Jiamin; Sandfort, Veit;
Summers, Ronald M (April 2020). "Automated CT biomarkers for opportunistic prediction of
future cardiovascular events and mortality in an asymptomatic screening population: a
retrospective cohort study" (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7454161). The
Lancet Digital Health. 2 (4): e192–e200. doi:10.1016/S2589-7500(20)30025-X (https://doi.or
g/10.1016%2FS2589-7500%2820%2930025-X). PMC 7454161 (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.g
ov/pmc/articles/PMC7454161). PMID 32864598 (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/3286459
8).
26. Tallam, Hima; Elton, Daniel C.; Lee, Sungwon; Wakim, Paul; Pickhardt, Perry J.; Summers,
Ronald M. (July 2022). "Fully Automated Abdominal CT Biomarkers for Type 2 Diabetes
Using Deep Learning" (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9270681). Radiology.
304 (1): 85–95. doi:10.1148/radiol.211914 (https://doi.org/10.1148%2Fradiol.211914).
PMC 9270681 (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9270681). PMID 35380492
(https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35380492).
27. "Artificial intelligence may improve diabetes diagnosis" (https://www.eurekalert.org/news-rele
ases/948056). EurekAlert!. Retrieved 15 February 2023.

Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Ronald_Summers&oldid=1224271201"