Arman Avesta, MD, PhD
Assistant Professor of Radiology (Pediatric Radiology)
Radiology - Pediatric Radiology
Bio
I'm a neuroradiologist and data scientist at Stanford. I care for patients at Stanford Children's Hospital and build computational systems for fetal and pediatric neuroimaging.
I'm passionate about how the fetal brain develops and how diseases such as genetic and metabolic disorders can disrupt that process. I'm also passionate about improving radiation therapy for brain tumors, building on my PhD work on segmenting brain tumors and surrounding brain structures.
Outside the hospital, I'm a ballroom dancer and have competed for the Harvard, Yale, and MIT ballroom dance teams. I also enjoy calisthenics, hiking, and tennis.
Honors & Awards
-
Early Career Grant, Thrasher Research Fund (2025)
-
Ralph Schlaeger Grant, Harvard Medical School - Massachusetts General Hospital (2024)
-
Magna Cum Laude Award, International Society for Magnetic Resonance in Medicine (2023)
-
First Place in Waltz/Tango/Foxtrot/Viennese-Waltz/Quickstep, La Classique Ballroom Dance Competition (2022)
-
TL1 Grant, National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (2022)
-
RSNA Fellow Grant, Radiological Society of North America (2021)
-
B. Leonard Holman Research Fellow, American Board of Radiology (2018)
-
Norman E. Leeds Award, Eastern Neuroradiological Society (2015)
Boards, Advisory Committees, Professional Organizations
-
Editorial Board, Radiology: Artificial Intelligence (2020 - 2022)
-
Founding President, Iranian Medical Student Association & IFMSA-Iran (2009 - 2010)
Professional Education
-
Fellowship, Harvard Medical School - Boston Children's Hospital, Pediatric Neuroradiology (2026)
-
Fellowship, Harvard Medical School - Massachusetts General Hospital, Neuroradiology (2025)
-
PhD, Yale University, Data Science & AI (2023)
-
Residency, Yale School of Medicine - Yale New Haven Hospital, Diagnostic Radiology (2021)
-
Postdoc, Harvard Medical School - Massachusetts General Hospital, Neuroscience (2016)
-
MD, Tehran University Medical School (2010)
All Publications
-
The Brain Tumor Segmentation (BraTS-METS) Challenge 2023: Brain Metastasis Segmentation on Pre-treatment MRI.
ArXiv
2024
Abstract
The translation of AI-generated brain metastases (BM) segmentation into clinical practice relies heavily on diverse, high-quality annotated medical imaging datasets. The BraTS-METS 2023 challenge has gained momentum for testing and benchmarking algorithms using rigorously annotated internationally compiled real-world datasets. This study presents the results of the segmentation challenge and characterizes the challenging cases that impacted the performance of the winning algorithms. Untreated brain metastases on standard anatomic MRI sequences (T1, T2, FLAIR, T1PG) from eight contributed international datasets were annotated in stepwise method: published UNET algorithms, student, neuroradiologist, final approver neuroradiologist. Segmentations were ranked based on lesion-wise Dice and Hausdorff distance (HD95) scores. False positives (FP) and false negatives (FN) were rigorously penalized, receiving a score of 0 for Dice and a fixed penalty of 374 for HD95. Eight datasets comprising 1303 studies were annotated, with 402 studies (3076 lesions) released on Synapse as publicly available datasets to challenge competitors. Additionally, 31 studies (139 lesions) were held out for validation, and 59 studies (218 lesions) were used for testing. Segmentation accuracy was measured as rank across subjects, with the winning team achieving a LesionWise mean score of 7.9. Common errors among the leading teams included false negatives for small lesions and misregistration of masks in space.The BraTS-METS 2023 challenge successfully curated well-annotated, diverse datasets and identified common errors, facilitating the translation of BM segmentation across varied clinical environments and providing personalized volumetric reports to patients undergoing BM treatment.
View details for PubMedID 37396600
View details for PubMedCentralID PMC10312806
https://orcid.org/0009-0008-6400-9326