Dr. Shipra Arya has received a $300,000 American Heart Association (AHA) Transformational Project Award to develop an automated method for prognosticating peripheral artery disease (PAD) using deep learning.
Arya, an Indian American Professor of Surgery (Vascular Surgery) at Stanford University School of Medicine, will lead the three-year project, Automated Peripheral Artery Calcium Score for Risk Stratification and Outcome Prediction in Peripheral Artery Disease, according to a university release.
The study aims to create an objective, fully automated Peripheral Artery Calcium Score (PACS) by applying deep learning to quantify calcium in lower extremity computed tomography (CT) scans.
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The team will compare PACS to current gold standard diagnostic measures, including the ankle-brachial index and toe-brachial index, and assess its ability to predict outcomes such as mortality, amputation, and major adverse limb events.
“This project is the first step toward integrating automated PACS into diagnosis, risk stratification, and treatment for PAD—similar to how coronary artery calcium scoring has transformed the care of coronary artery disease,” Arya said.
Funding will support the development and validation of the automated PACS measure, eliminating the need for semi-automated manual measurements. It will also fund the creation of advanced deep learning models for calcium detection and quantification, comparisons against existing measures, and evaluation of PACS as a predictor of clinical outcomes.
The project team includes Akshay Chaudhari, PhD (Biomedical Data Science, expert in machine learning for medical imaging); Fatima Rodriguez, MD, MPH (Cardiology, expert in cardiovascular prevention and imaging analytics); Jillian Melbourne (research program manager and analyst); and Benjamin Liu (medical student and AI/ML analyst).
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Arya is also the section chief of vascular surgery at the VA Palo Alto Healthcare System. She has a Master’s degree in epidemiology from the Harvard School of Public Health, focusing on research methodology and cardiovascular epidemiology.
She completed her general surgery residency at Creighton University Medical Center and a vascular surgery fellowship at the University of Michigan. She’s board certified in both general and vascular surgery by the American Board of Surgery.
Arya is also the President of the Surgical Outcomes Club (SOC), a national organization of surgical health services researchers, since November 2021. The club was founded in the late 1990s and focuses on elevating surgical HSR and training the next generation of HSR researchers. It offers programs like the Zinner fellowship and a writing series with JAMA Surgery.
Her current work focuses on streamlining frailty evaluation and implementing patient and system-level interventions to improve surgical quality and provide patient-centered care.