Faculty & Researchers

Dr. Chapiro is a board-certified Diagnostic and Interventional Radiologist and an Associate Professor of Radiology, Digestive Diseases (Hepatology) and of Biomedical Engineering. He is the Principal Investigator of the Yale Interventional Oncology Research Lab and Director of the Center for Minimally Invasive Therapies. After graduating from the University of Leipzig and upon completion of his research thesis at the Justus-Liebig University in Giessen with summa cum laude, he served as a postdoctoral research fellow in interventional oncology at The Johns Hopkins Hospital and then as radiology resident at the Department of Radiology, Charité University Hospital in Berlin. He joined the Department of Radiology and Biomedical Imaging in 2016 as a research scientist and interventional radiology resident from Berlin, Germany. Dr. Chapiro’s research focuses on developing new quantitative imaging biomarkers for the diagnosis, characterization, and therapeutic management of liver cancer. His translational research portfolio includes the development of novel embolic agents as well as the application of artificial intelligence solutions for the management of liver cancer. His basic research interest mainly focuses on developing new tools to characterize the tumor microenvironment and the immune system in the setting of loco-regional, image-guided therapies of liver cancer. Creating innovative and clinically applicable imaging solutions for liver cancer with advanced molecular imaging, image post-processing and machine learning approaches and translating them to clinical practice has been his central mission for the past decade. He authored and co-authored >170 original research articles, reviews and book chapters and gave more than 150 talks and invited lectures at national and international forums within the last seven years including in Europe, China, South Korea and the Middle East. His research has also resulted in several patents, 510(k)-approved medical products and significant grant support from federal, foundational and industry sources. He is an active research mentor to more than 70 undergraduate, medical and graduate students as well as peers both at Yale and other national and international institutions. Being an active contributor, journal-, abstract- and grant reviewer in several professional societies (RSNA, SIR, CIRSE and SIO), he is also committed to education and the mission of disseminating research data and scientific knowledge. Dr. Chapiro is an Editorial Board member of the Journal of Hepatology (EASL), Radiology and Radiology: AI (RSNA), Journal of Vascular and Interventional Radiology (SIR) and Cardiovascular and Interventional Radiology: Oncology (CIRSE). He is a member of the American College of Radiology Liver Imaging Reporting and Data System (LI-RADS) Steering Committee, he additionally chairs the Grant Committee of the Society of Interventional Oncology and chaired the Annual Meeting Program Planning Committee for the Subspecialty of Interventional Radiology at the Annual Radiological Society of North America meeting 2021-2023. He is the co-initiator of the "Rising Star" Student Exchange Program in collaboration with the Charité University Hospital in Berlin and directs the Center for Minimally Invasive Therapies. Dr. Chapiro is the Associate Director of the Clinical and Translational Core of the Yale Liver Center.

Matteo Conte is a Postdoctoral Associate in the Department of Radiology and Biomedical Imaging at Yale University, where he hopes to continue his medical training. He earned his Doctor of Medicine degree from the University of Padova, Italy, with a thesis focused on spontaneous intracranial hypotension. His academic journey includes a research traineeship at the renowned Mayo Clinic in Minnesota and clinical externships across the United States. Before joining Yale, Dr. Conte worked as a primary care physician in Italy, serving the community of Romano d’Ezzelino, a small town at the foothills of Monte Grappa. His current research focuses on catheter-directed therapies for the treatment of pulmonary embolism and deep vein thrombosis. He investigates imaging-based outcome prediction, procedural technique optimization, and vascular segmentation to improve treatment strategies and long-term patient outcomes.

Eliot Funai graduated from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and previously worked at Johns Hopkins University before coming to Yale. His work as a clinical research coordinator is to develop and oversee the management and execution of clinical trials, primarily concerning locoregional therapies for treating liver cancers. His experience is with investigator initiated studies, industry and NIH-funded trials, and cooperative group studies.

Luisa Heidemann is a visiting undergraduate in the Yale Interventional Oncology (IO) Research Lab and a medical student at Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin, Germany. As a core member of the Minimally Invasive Tumor Therapies Lab at Charité, she focuses on the locoregional effects following transarterial chemoembolization (TACE) in the context of hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC). At the renowned annual meeting of the Radiological Society of North America in 2024 in Chicago, USA, she presented preliminary results and received a travel grant from the Rolf W. Günther Foundation for Radiological Research. In the Yale IO Lab, she utilizes her previously acquired methodology to quantify longitudinal immune cell infiltration induced by drug-eluting bead TACE in human HCC samples.

Dr. Fabian M. Laage Gaupp graduated from Medical School at Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich and completed his surgical internship at Cornell Presbyterian Hospital in New York. He then pursued residency training in Diagnostic and Interventional Radiology at Yale New Haven Hospital, where he served as Chief Resident of Interventional Radiology. In 2021, he was appointed Assistant Professor of Vascular and Interventional Radiology in Yale's Department of Radiology and Biomedical Imaging. Dr. Laage Gaupp is dedicated to training the next generation of Interventional Radiologists. After serving as Assistant Program Director and Medical Student Clerkship Director for Yale's Interventional Radiology education program for several years, he took over as Interventional Radiology Program Director in 2024. He specializes in minimally invasive treatments for Men’s and Women’s Health, offering innovative solutions for conditions such as benign prostatic hyperplasia (BPH) and uterine fibroids. Through image-guided procedures like prostate artery embolization and uterine fibroid embolization, Dr. Laage Gaupp provides effective, outpatient-based treatment options that eliminate the need for major surgery, allowing patients to return home the same day. As a co-founder of Road2IR, an international consortium led by Yale, Muhimbili University of Health and Allied Sciences (MUHAS) in Tanzania, Emory, and other institutions in North America and Europe, Dr. Laage Gaupp has contributed to establishing several Interventional Radiology training programs in East Africa, expanding access to minimally invasive procedures to more patients.

Dr. Lin received the B.S. degree from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and the Ph.D. degree from Duke University, all in biomedical engineering. He is currently the Director for Clinical Research in North America for Visage Imaging and is stationed at Yale-New Haven Hospital where he oversees, coordinates, drives and directs research collaborations with high profile academic hospitals in North America to develop new solutions for diagnostic image analysis and guidance that improve clinical and operational outcomes while reducing cost of care. This includes Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) applications in the Radiology enterprise diagnostic imaging solutions space. Dr. Lin identifies opportunities for academic-industry research partnerships, and acts as the liaison between Visage Imaging researchers and clinical collaborators to translate ideas to prototype for clinical validation, with the goal of technology transfer to product. A highlight is Ming coordinated the clinical data curation and ground-truth annotation for building a fully automatic breast density AI classifier that provides an ACR BI-RADS Atlas 5th Edition breast density category to aid radiologists in the assessment of breast tissue composition from full field digital mammography and digital breast tomosynthesis systems and drove the clinical validation with Yale radiologists and Visage developers that led to transfer to product and regulatory approvals in 21 months following IRB approval and has been in full clinical production use at Yale since April 2021. Moreover, Dr. Lin directed the study with Yale radiologists to assess the AI algorithm’s post-clinical deployment performance, and we found there was 99.35% agreement in classifying the breast density between the AI and the radiologist. This was the first FDA-cleared AI algorithm that reported having >1000 patients for validating the AI from two different clinical sites: Yale and New York University (NYU), and it was the first for a major PACS vendor to offer a self-developed, FDA-cleared AI algorithm natively into their PACS: Visage Breast Density, K201411, 510(k) clearance, January 2021, Health Canada Licensed, October 2020, Australian TGA approval, July 2020, CE Mark Cleared, May 2020. Another effort Dr. Lin is working on is multi-institution AI research to develop robust deep learning methods for generating patient-specific virtual-high-count PET images from standard PET images, thereby saving imaging time, reducing radiation dose, and increasing scanner longevity. This work is being conducted in an NIH R01 academic-industry partnership grant where Dr. Lin is the Visage Imaging, Inc. Principal Investigator (PI), and the other partners are Yale New Haven, Massachusetts General Brigham, and University of California Davis hospitals. Dr. Lin also is directly involved in research to develop better ways to treat patients with liver cancer using transcatheter arterial chemoembolization (TACE), and in this context, he is also the chief engineer and operations manager of the Yale Interventional Oncology Research Lab. Dr. Lin is Principal Investigator (PI) on two NIH R01 grants and the Industry PI on its renewal NIH R01 grant (three grants in total) to improve the diagnosis, treatment, and response assessment after transcatheter arterial chemoembolization for patients with liver cancer. Dr. Lin is the inventor of 3D quantification TACE therapy response tool (qEASL) and in collaboration with clinical partners, validated, and showed clinical relevance (ability to predict patient survival) that led to transfer to commercial product (FDA 510(k) cleared December 2016 - Multi-Modality Tumor Tracking (MMTT) application). Prior to Visage Imaging, Dr. Lin was the Philips research site manager and senior researcher stationed onsite at Yale where he managed the research portfolio and partnership Philips has with Yale. Ming was inducted to the Council of Distinguished Investigators in the Academy for Radiology and Biomedical Imaging Research on October 10, 2024 for his outstanding contributions to medical imaging.

Lisa Peschke is a visiting undergraduate researcher in the Interventional Oncology (IO) Research Lab at the Department of Radiology and Biomedical Imaging, Yale School of Medicine, where she joined as part of the “Rising Star” exchange program—a collaborative initiative between Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin and Yale. She is currently pursuing her medical degree at Charité. At Charité, she was involved in clinical research in the Department of Thoracic Surgery, where she led an independent study evaluating the postoperative course of patients following elective lung surgery under an Enhanced Recovery After Surgery (ERAS) protocol. She further contributed to clinical science through an independent project in the Department of Cardiology at Charité Campus Virchow Hospital, focusing on the validation of a non-invasive MRI-based method for measuring central venous oxygen saturation. At the IO Lab at Yale, she is working on a basic science research project investigating immune response following different ablation therapies in varying tumor phenotypes in the context of liver cancer. Her research stay is supported by the Biomedical Education Program (BMEP) scholarship.

Selma Saclier is a Visiting Undergraduate in Research in the Department of Radiology and Biomedical Imaging at Yale School of Medicine, where she joined the Interventional Oncology (IO) Research Lab as part of the “Rising Star” exchange program, a collaborative initiative between Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin and Yale. At Charité, she is a member of the Minimally Invasive Tumor Therapies (MITT) Lab, where her research focused on the correlation of anatomical parameters in VX2 tumor-bearing New Zealand White rabbits. The project was conducted within the framework of an animal welfare-oriented study investigating the physiological variability of anatomical structures and was funded by a Charité 3R research grant. At the IO Lab at Yale, she is pursuing a data science-based project aimed at predicting recurrence after thermal ablation of hepatocellular carcinoma. This involves a retrospective analysis of imaging data using coregistration techniques and radiomics. She was awarded the IO Essentials Scholarship and attended the Annual Meeting of the Society of Interventional Oncology (SIO) in January 2025 in Las Vegas, USA. Her research stay at Yale is supported by a travel grant from the Rolf W. Günther Foundation for Radiological Research. In addition, she is a recipient of the Deutschlandstipendium for outstanding academic performance and the Biomedical Education Program (BMEP) scholarship for her project at Yale.

Jessica is currently pursuing her PhD in Biomedical Engineering at Yale. She received her B.Sc in Biomedical Sciences from the Universidade Estadual de Santa Cruz (UESC), Brazil, with further research experience from McGill University, Canada, and Harvard School of Public Health, USA through the Science Without Borders Scholarship Program. Upon graduating from UESC, she received her fully funded master’s degree in Biomedical Sciences with a focus on cancer development and immune responses from Radboud Universiteit, Netherlands. She concluded her program at the Department of Immunobiology at Yale University. She worked as a Postgraduate Research Associate at the Department of Radiology and Biomedical Imaging, where she optimized animal models of liver cancer for molecular characterization of the tumor microenvironment to loco-regional therapies from an imaging perspective.

Annabella Shewarega is a resident in Interventional Radiology at Yale New Haven Hospital and a PhD candidate in Biology at the University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany. Her research focuses on developing non-invasive imaging biomarkers and novel locoregional immunotherapy strategies for liver cancer. Her interest in interventional oncology began with her doctoral research at the Yale Interventional Oncology Lab, where she investigated the combination of ablative treatments and immunoadjuvants to study their effects on the tumor immune microenvironment. She has led and contributed to studies aimed at identifying immune and imaging-based biomarkers that can guide personalized treatment strategies and predict therapeutic and immunologic responses to locoregional interventions. Prior to starting residency, she completed her postdoctoral training at the Yale Interventional Oncology Lab, where her work focused on characterizing the liver tumor microenvironment using a combination of advanced imaging, quantitative analysis, and immunologic profiling techniques. These projects leverage a strong foundation in preclinical research methods and translational models of liver cancer, with particular emphasis on inflammation-driven mouse tumor systems and the VX2 rabbit model. Her research has been supported by several awards and fellowships, including funding from the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), the Rolf W. Günther Foundation, and the Heinrich-Hertz Foundation. She is a recipient of the Society of Interventional Oncology Research Grant, which supports her ongoing studies on locoregional delivery of immunotherapy in liver cancer. Her long-term goal is to bridge imaging science with therapeutic innovation to advance personalized, image-guided cancer care.

Jonathan Tefera is a resident physician in Interventional Radiology at Yale New Haven Hospital. His clinical and research interests focus on minimally invasive cancer therapies, particularly in liver cancer. Dr. Tefera has led studies on portal vein embolization and was recognized with the RSNA Trainee Research Prize. He brings a strong background in translational oncology and remains dedicated to advancing patient-centered, image-guided interventions.

Tal Zeevi is a machine learning researcher at Yale University, affiliated with the Image Processing and Analysis Group and the Yale Interventional Oncology Research Lab. His research focuses on predictive uncertainty in deep learning, particularly in medical image analysis where limited data and model underspecification can support multiple clinically plausible interpretations. His work develops post-training, inference-time methods that characterize how uncertainty is structured and expressed within a trained model, and how this structure affects the delineation of anatomical boundaries and disease extent. A central emphasis of his research is decision stability. He studies whether model-derived clinical conclusions remain consistent under repeated evaluation. He applies these methods across cancer and neuroimaging applications, including prostate cancer imaging, hepatocellular carcinoma risk modeling, and interventional radiology workflows. His work has received editorial commentary in Radiology, The New England Journal of Medicine, and The American Journal of Roentgenology. Prior to Yale, he was a research scientist at Intel’s Artificial Intelligence Solutions Group, where he applied machine learning to problems in processor architecture and system design. He holds graduate degrees in engineering and applied statistics, with earlier training in multi-agent systems and game-theoretic modeling. At Yale, he contributes to graduate and undergraduate teaching in biomedical image processing and research ethics, and holds the Certificate of College Teaching Preparation (2025).

James Duncan, the Ebenezer K. Hunt Professor of Biomedical Engineering, has focused his research and teaching in the areas of biomedical image processing and analysis.Duncan, who holds joint appointments in diagnostic radiology and electrical engineering, is the associate chair and director of undergraduate studies in the Department of Biomedical Engineering as well as the vice-chair for bioimaging sciences research in diagnostic radiology. He is particularly interested in the use of model-based mathematical strategies for the analysis of biomedical images. He helped pioneer the use of geometrical models for segmenting deformable (typically anatomical) objects of approximately known shape and for tracking certain forms of non-rigid object motion, and later soft tissue deformation, most notably that of the heart.Duncan and his research team performed seminal work starting in 1987 on the use of parameterized global shape models to incorporate a notion of known prior object shape into the segmentation process using a Bayesian reasoning strategy, helping lead the way towards the use of strategies for automatically finding certain known anatomical structure from any of a variety of medical (e.g. computer tomography (CT), magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), ultrasound) and biological (e.g. confocal microscopy) images. The strategies he developed have resulted in major advances in bioimaging. He and his research collaborators have applied these strategies to locate the cortical gray matter layer and a variety of co-localized subcortical gray matter structures in the brain as well as to locate the structure near the prostate gland. More recently, Duncan’s team has begun to show that these same techniques will be useful for estimating gray matter-constrained activations from functional MRI data and could help guide the recovery of quantitative biochemical information from MR spectroscopy.Beginning in the late 1980s, Duncan also pioneered using shape features on the inner and outer surfaces of the heart wall as material tags for tracking left ventricular motion. This technique was successfully applied to other non-rigid tracking problems in cell biology and became the basis for a variety of efforts internationally. Duncan and his research team used this strategy for more sophisticated analysis in echocardiography. The team’s approach is now recognized in the medical-image-analysis community as among the first to incorporate true physical models into image analysis strategies and has helped develop a more general area of physical/biomechanical model-based re covery of both structural and functional information from biomedical images. Duncan’s laboratory has also developed initial forms of these techniques to estimate brain shift during epilepsy neurosurgery and guide fractionated prostate radiotherapy, among other uses. His work has resulted in three U.S. patents.Duncan is the principal investigator of major research funded by the National Institutes of Health. Before coming to Yale in 1983, he worked for Hughes Aircraft Company. He holds a B.S.E.E. from Lafayette College, an M.S. from the University of California at Los Angeles and a Ph.D. from the University of Southern California.Duncan is a fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering. He is president of the International Society for Medical Image Computing and Computer Assisted Intervention and is a member of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence and the I.E.E.E. Computer Society, among other professional organizations.

Dr. Pollak went to medical school at the Columbia University College of Physicians & Surgeons and subsequently did his Diagnostic Radiology residency at the Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center. His fellowship in Vascular & Interventional Radiology was at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania. He then joined the Yale University School of Medicine Department of Radiology and Biomedical Imaging in the section of V&IR and served as the section chief and director of the fellowship program in this sub-specialty for over two decades. While active in all aspects of vascular & interventional radiology, his current major interests are embolotherapy (embolization), including for acquired and congenital vascular abnormalities and malformations (other than in the brain), fibroids, and malignancies, as well as other minimally invasive treatments for tumors, including local ablation. In addition, he is an expert in vascular procedures in the liver, such as intrahepatic portosystemic shunts and venous procedures, such as inferior vena cava filters. Dr. Pollak is the current director of the multidisciplinary Yale Hereditary Hemorrhagic Telangiectasia Program, which was started as the first of its kind in the world in the early 1990s. As such, he has extensive experience in the evaluation and management of patients with this genetic disorder, with particular expertise in embolization of pulmonary arteriovenous malformations, which frequently occur in this population. Dr. Pollak is also the co-director of the Yale Pulmonary Embolism Response Team, a multidisciplinary group of physicians interested in the advancement of the management of patients with this condition, especially those with more severe manifestations.

Dr. Schlachter is an Assistant Professor of Radiology and Biomedical Imaging at the Yale School of Medicine.Dr. Schlachter's research interests include: Liver Cancer and diseases involving the liver.Dr. Schlachter completed his surgical intern year at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine and his Radiology Residency from the University of Connecticut School of Medicine. After finishing his Interventional Radiology fellowship at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in 2012, he was hired as an Attending where he focused on treating a wide range of vascular diseases including liver cancer. Dr. Schlachter is committed to working together to determine the most effective treatments for his patients.

Dr. Jeffrey C. Weinreb is Director of the MRI Service at Yale New Haven Hospital and Professor in the Department of Radiology and Biomedical Imaging at the Yale School of Medicine. After graduating Phi Beta Kappa from the MIT, he received his MD from the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. He has held faculty positions at UT Southwestern Medical School, Columbia College for Physicians and Surgeons, and NYU School of Medicine, where he was Director of MRI for 15 years and led a group that pioneered the development of Body MRI. For more than three decades, Dr. Weinreb has been an innovator in MRI. He is a leading authority on MRI contrast agents and MRI safety, and he has made seminal contributions to clinical applications of MRI in the abdomen, spine, breast, prostate, breast, vascular system, obstetrics, and gynecology. He has authored/co-authored three textbooks and more than 230 peer reviewed manuscripts, served on the editorial boards of numerous medical journals, and presented more than 1000 invited lectures throughout the world. Dr. Weinreb was the Principal Investigator for the NCI sponsored cooperative Multicenter Study of In Vivo MR Spectroscopy for the Evaluation of Prostate Cancer, and led an international effort to develop PI-RADS (Prostate Imaging Reporting and Data System) to standardize the acquisition, interpretation, and reporting of prostate MRI. In 2018 he was one of the organizers for the NIH/NIBIB workshop on clinical manifestations of gadolinium deposition. He recently helped to develop joint ACR-National Kidney Foundation consensus recommendations for the use of intravenous contrast media in patients with renal disease. Dr. Weinreb has had numerous leadership position in professional organizations, including Vice President of the American College of Radiology, Chairman of the ACR Forum, member of the ACR Board of Chancellors, President of the New York Roentgen Society, and President of the SCBT-MR. As Chairman of the ACR Commission on Quality and Safety and Chairman of the ACR MRI Accreditation Program, Dr. Weinreb spearheaded efforts to improve the quality of medical imaging in the United States. He has received numerous awards, including the Gold Medal Awards in 2017 from the ACR and the in 2019 from the SCBT-MR (now called the SABI).