Dr Bilbily ’06 credits HTS for some of the “best years of [his] life” - enabling him to “solve problems in [his] own way as a very curious person by nature.” He remembers Mr Doma and Mr Bunner’s classes as particular environments where he was encouraged to ask questions and explore different paths to the solution beyond what the textbook described.
Coming out of HTS however, he had no idea that he would land here. He comes from a family of doctors which became the default career trajectory for him - attending McMaster and U of T for his undergraduate degree in Health Sciences and his MD / Residency respectively. During medical school, he read a landmark paper about advances in image analysis by using ML by one of the godfathers of AI, Jeffrey Hinton and hasn’t looked back since.
Rho, the AI tool Dr Bilbily ’06 helped create through his startup 16 Bit, screens x-ray scans for low bone mineral density (BMD) and alerts physicians of increased risk of osteoporosis, which is often underdiagnosed. This, in turn, creates the opportunity for preventative treatment, placing less burden on the health system as a whole.
The tool has achieved regulatory approval in Canada, the U.S., Australia, Singapore, and Europe. In Canada, it has been used to screen over 500,000 Canadians, identifying over 150,000 with hidden disease.
As the co-founder and co-CEO of 16 Bit, an AI-based medical device company, Assistant Professor at the University of Toronto, and director of Sunnybrook’s Augmented Precision Medicine (APM) Lab, Dr. Bilbily continues to spread awareness about the opportunities for AI to improve healthcare in Ontario and beyond!
His research more broadly explores the ways in which big data can be leveraged by machine learning (ML) to extricate important clinical insights. On top of his work with 16 Bit and the APM Lab, the majority of his week is spent caring for patients as a Staff Radiologist and Nuclear Medicine Physician at Sunnybrook hospital. For 16 Bit and the APM Lab, he believes that the next 5 years will hold great promise in regards to the quantity of clinically actionable information extracted from routinely acquired medical images, offering avenues for improved screening and treatment at scale.
When asked about the medical AI industry as a whole, he was quick to admit that he’s seen many companies come and go trying to build tools devoid of genuine clinical value. In his words, it’s “way easier for [him] to learn programming than a programmer to learn radiology” and deliver a tool worthy of clinical use.
In his mind, the emergence of “AI is like electricity just being invented.” Minds like Dr Bilbily’s are still reckoning with the many ways to harness it to “make healthcare not only better, but more sustainable” for patients, health care professionals, and countries.
Dr Bilbily ’06 is but one of thousands of HTS alumni whose work exemplifies our Graduate Profile values of problem solving, impact, intellectual agility and character-led citizenship.