Dr. Raúl San José Estépar

Co-Director, Applied Chest Imaging Laboratory
Lead Investigator, Brigham and Women’s Hospital
Associate Professor of Radiology, Harvard Medical School

Raúl is co-director of the Applied Chest Imaging Laboratory, lead scientist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Associate Professor of Radiology at Harvard Medical School. With a background in Telecommunications Engineering from the University of Valladolid in Spain, Raúl has dedicated his career to advancing medical imaging techniques and applications.

Raúl research focuses on developing quantitative imaging biomarkers for chronic lung diseases, including Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD), Pulmonary Vascular Disease (PVD) and Interstitial Lung Disease (ILD). Dr. San José Estépar is a pioneer in using artificial intelligence and deep learning techniques to analyze chest CT scans, contributing significantly to the understanding of pulmonary vascular remodeling and parenchymal lung injury. He leads the development of the open-source Chest Imaging Platform, empowering systems biology discovery and novel surrogate targets for drug discovery and clinical trial development. As a Principal Investigator for numerous NIH awards and industry-sponsored studies, Raúl has been instrumental in major multicenter national studies, including COPDGene, the Framingham Heart Study Pulmonary Research Center, the CARDIA Lung Study, the ALA Lung Health Cohort, and the RECOVER study for long COVID. His innovative research in imaging biomarkers has resulted in over 250 peer-reviewed publications and several…Read More

Dr. George R Washko

Associate Physician, Brigham and Women’s Hospital
Associate Professor of Medicine, Harvard Medical School

I am a clinical investigator in Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease with a focus in imaging and quantitative image analysis.  I have been on staff for approximately 6 years and have been awarded a K23 Mentored Career Development Award with the aims of developing image based biomarkers for airway disease in smokers.  In addition to my K23, I am one 10 national PIs of the NHLBI funded COPD Clinical Research Networks.    The goal of this network is to find therapies for the treatment and/or prevention of acute exacerbations of COPD.  We recently completed a multicenter randomized placebo controlled trial of azithromycin and published the results in the NEJM.  In addition to my clinical research, I maintain an imaging group focused on Computed Tomographic characterization of lung disease.  In addition to our role as one of the image analysis sites in the COPDGene Study, we are the image analysis center for the Framingham Heart Study Pulmonary Research Center.  To date we have processed…Read More