Through the use of interactive, computer-assisted health-assessments, Professor Farah Ahmad hopes to foster equity in health care, especially at the intersections of gender, ethnicity and migration. Ahmad will present her research and discuss how embracing eHealth innovations can boost community empowerment as part of the York eHealth Alliance Lecture Series.

The lecture, “eHealth Innovations to Address Health Inequities: A Case of Computer-Assisted Health-Assessment in Primary Care,” will take place Thursday, Feb. 16, from 3 to 4pm, at 402 Health, Nursing & Environmental Studies Building.

Farah Ahmad

“Equity in health-care access is a key social determinant of population health,” says Ahmad, who is based in the Faculty of Health’s School of Health Policy & Management. “Fostering equity mechanisms is more salient today than ever before due to the challenges of economic recession and changing demographics.”

One way to embrace eHealth is by using interactive computer-assisted health-assessments in primary care for prevention and health promotion. Her recent research demonstrates that these kinds of assessments can enable patients to disclose socially stigmatized issues, such as partner violence and compromised mental health, as well as assist providers to offer needed care and referrals.

Ahmad’s action research on eHealth for psychosocial healthcare re-orientation takes place at the critical intersections of gender, ethnicity and migration. It is grounded in principles of social science includes quantitative and qualitative studies with inner city women, refugees and health-care providers. She will highlight the potential to develop integrated care models as an important pathway for simultaneous actions on the multiple health determinants that improve life conditions.

Ahmad is affiliated with the Centre for Research on Inner City Health, St. Michael’s Hospital as an associate scientist and with the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) Strategic Training Initiatives on Health Research on Health, Care, Place & Technology as a mentor. She held several prestigious fellowships, including awards from the CIHR during her doctorate and post-doctorate.

For more information, visit the Faculty of Health website.

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The talk, “Time Reversal Array Imaging Algorithms: Application to Breast Cancer Detection”, will take place tomorrow, from 3 to 4pm at 3033 Computer Science & Engineering Building, Keele campus.

Left: Amir Asif

Breast cancer is the second leading cause of cancer death after lung cancer among women, but diagnostic mammography frequently generates many abnormal findings leading to additional, costly imaging procedures and biopsies. Asif will discuss a different backscatter imaging paradigm based on time-reversal signal processing that uses multipath propagation to its advantage for breast cancer detection.

With the introduction of time reversal, says he believes for the first time there is analytical proof of the phenomena of super resolution focusing observed with time reversal. He will discuss time-reversal imaging algorithms used for detecting and accurately estimating the location of targets in a high-scattering environment with strong clutters.

The time-reversal beam-forming imager is applied for detecting and locating early-stage breast cancer tumours from MRI data, says Asif. He will present initial results based on the finite difference, time domain electromagnetic model and illustrate that the proposed detector estimates the locations of breast cancer tumours with a higher accuracy than some of the current state-of-the-art signal processing estimation algorithms they have tested.

Asif received MSc and PhD degrees in electrical and computer engineering from Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) in Pittsburgh, Penn. He was formerly on the faculty of CMU, and the Technical University of British Columbia (now part of Simon Fraser University) in Vancouver.

Asif works in the area of statistical signal processing and communications. His current projects include error-resilient, scalable video compression; time-reversal, array imaging detection; genomic signal processing; and sparse, block-banded matrix technologies.

He has authored over 100 technical contributions, including invited ones, published in international journals and conference proceedings. He is also co-author of the textbook, Continuous and Discrete Time Signals and Systems (Cambridge University Press, 2007).

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