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Ridley, Kate Madden Yee, Will Morton, and Amerigo Allegretto Oct 26, 2021 Almost two years since the start of the global COVID-19 pandemic, the novel coronavirus continues to exert a powerful influence over the worldand radiology. That’s evident in this year’s Minnies awards, where issues related to the pandemic were front and center. For example, the Minnies laureate for Scientific Paper of the Year was a study on changes visible on imaging exams that occurred after COVID-19 vaccination. The pandemic itself was named Most Significant News Event in Radiology, while physician burnoutwhich has been exacerbated by the pandemicwas named Biggest Threat to Radiology by the Minnies expert panel. Still, this year’s Minnies winners also demonstrate the resilience of radiology and the brilliant minds that are moving the discipline forward in the face of the adversity caused by COVID-19. From stellar researchers to inspiring educators, the winners of the 2021 Minnies awards showcase the spirit of creativity and innovation that makes radiology such an amazing specialty. Congratulations to all the winners of the 2021 Minnies awards, and also to the runners-up and the more than 200 candidates who made the semifinalist list across 15 categories. You can view the full slate of semifinalists , as well as our comprehensive list of all the Minnies winners over the past 22 years . Most Influential Radiology Researcher Minnies 2021 winner: Dr. Judy Gichoya, Emory University From her days as a medical student at Moi Teaching and Referral Hospital in Kenya, Dr. Judy Gichoya has been interested in researching the impact of information technology (IT) on the practice of medicine. Dr. Judy Gichoya. After earning her medical degree at Moi, she served for one year as a medical officer at a hospital outside Nairobi, where she began considering the impact that IT tools could have on care delivery through programs such as clinical decision support for physicians treating individuals with HIV/AIDS. She continued this focus by earning a master’s degree in health informatics at Indiana University’s Regenstrief Institute, an organization dedicated to studying the use of informatics in healthcare. After returning to Africa for a short time, she decided to specialize in radiology and was accepted at Indiana University as a radiology resident. Gichoya continued her focus on imaging informatics during her residency, which took place at a time when many medical students were avoiding radiology due to concerns about artificial intelligence (AI) potentially taking their jobs. She said she became an advocate for AI in medicine, organizing clubs that brought together physicians with computer geeks to share knowledge. "I was very surprised at how good the technology had become," Gichoya said. "I decided my role was to do a lot of advocacy, especially as medical students were not considering radiology." Following her residency, she completed a fellowship in interventional radiology at the Dotter Department of Interventional Radiology at Oregon Health and Science University. She pursued interventional radiology because she felt that on returning to Africa it would be the discipline that would enable her to have the biggest impact on care in the region. On completing her fellowship, she said she was drawn to Emory University because the institution’s strong emphasis on informatics would enable her to continue pursuing this aspect of her career. Among the mentors at Emory, she cites as having influenced her research are Dr. Nabil Safdar, Dr. Janice Newsome, and Elizabeth Krupinski, PhD. "I really ride on the shoulders of giants," she said. Gichoya is an advocate for what she calls "village mentoring" or "hive learning," in which people from multiple disparate disciplines are brought together to work on a problem. This can include researchers from different universities and even different continents. One of her current projects is one that’s funded by the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) to develop an Open Data Science Platform that will help harness the use of informatics to improve healthcare in Africa. The project is intended to develop a cloud-based data sharing platform that will be used to spur discovery and innovation in healthcare on the continent. She plans to continue her investigations into AI and healthcare, in particular the role of AI in revealing healthcare disparities. For example, earlier in 2021 she led a group that published a paper to arXiv.org that revealed that AI algorithms could be developed to detect the racial identity of patients from their medical images. Gichoya noted the pervasive nature of healthcare disparities, such as the fact that pregnant Black women have higher rates of postpartum hemorrhage, even after adjusting for factors such as socioeconomic status and education level. With the arXiv paper, she and her co-investigators still don’t fully understand how AI algorithms were able to identify the racial identity of patientsa fact that itself warrants additional investigation, especially given concerns about the "black box" nature of AI. "Despite all the work that we’ve done, we still can’t tell you why the algorithm can see this," Gichoya said. Runner-up: Dr. Constance Lehman, PhD, Massachusetts General Hospital Most Effective Radiology Educator Minnies 2021 winner: Dr. Tessa Cook, PhD, University of Pennsylvania Dr. Tessa Cook, PhD, likes variety and the combination of clinical practice and radiology education is what makes her career satisfying. That philosophy could also be what has led Cook to be named Most Effective Radiology Educator in the Minnies for a second time, with her first award coming in 2018 . Dr. Tessa Cook, PhD. "I have this problem of being interested in a lot of different things at once, and when I was in training, if you’d asked me to predict my career trajectory, I wouldn’t have been able to say," she explained. "It’s been a lovely surprise over the years to see where my work has taken me. Right now, half of my week is clinical practice and the other half is teaching, research, and imaging informatics. Every day’s schedule is different and I find that very fulfilling." Cook comes by her teaching chops honestly: She grew up in a...