The Levy Lab is embedded in the Emerging Diagnostic and Investigative Technologies (EDIT) program in the Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine at Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center. Professor Joshua Levy serves as Principal Investigator of the lab and Co-Head of the EDIT Machine Learning (ML) Group. The Levy Lab is comprised of undergraduates, Master's, medical, and doctoral students who aspire to advance biomedical research, improve public health and do public good through high throughput computation. Additionally, the EDIT ML program hosts a national summer research program for high school and undergraduate students that provides exposure to biomedical research.

"Emerging technologies informed by and for clinicians have the potential for lasting translational impact."

Lab Structure and Resources

Through a series of lectures, guided projects, and IRB supported basic research, lab members develop algorithms to explore diagnostic spaces in pathology from cancer detection, to gigapixel image manipulation, to text prediction. Students are placed into teams to design and pitch projects and adhere to a team culture which promotes broad collaboration. Dr. Levy meets weekly with lab project teams to discuss updates and provide guidance on the technical aspects of their projects (including presentation/manuscript preparation), while providing tutorials (e.g., overview of operating in an HPC environment), a lab GitHub based wiki page, and over the summer a weekly seminar series to help them better understand emerging themes in the field. Dr. Levy also holds weekly office hours for general inquiries. Students in the EDIT ML lab have access to vast compute resources: 1) QDP-Alpha HPC resource for research applications, a computational node system comprising: 400 CPU cores, 416GB of GPU memory, 1.5TB of RAM and 150TB or storage, 2) Pathology Local Cluster (PLC) a modular HPC system for mature clinical applications comprising a Genome analysis node (128 CPU cores, 768GB RAM, 12GB GPU memory, 100TB storage), and a Machine learning node (40 CPU cores, 128GB GPU memory, 512GB RAM, 100TB storage), and 3) Personal computing equipment, including access to surface tablets to study histology slides and a local computing workstation for rapid algorithm prototyping.

Interdisciplinary Mindset

Since the Levy Lab is fully embedded within the clinical departments of Pathology and Dermatology at Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center, members are challenged to think critically about the successful design of clinically impactful technologies. Expectations for student researchers are no different. As part of the summer research internship program, students are asked to present their research in front of medical faculty, residents and technical staff. Students are encouraged to communicate how their work will directly address “big picture” issues in Pathology versus highlighting the computational aspects, which are important but of less relevance for the target audience. We hope these experiences will continue to shape how students engage project stakeholders both during and after their time at Dartmouth.