Joon-Nyung Heo

Joon-Nyung is a neurologist who has loved  programming since he was 10 years old. He founded a cloud desktop service in 2007 which was awarded an excellence prize at a government competition. He also co-founded a medical non-profit organization in 2009, offering free medical care for homeless people in Seoul. During residency, Joon-Nyung used computer vision and machine learning for clinical research on strokes and established a nationwide multi-center stroke registry which is still actively managed with national funding.

In 2020, the unexpected upside of the COVID-19 pandemic demanded innovative and timely technological solutions to support healthcare workers. In cooperation with the Korea CDC, Joon-Nyung successfully deployed a clinical decision support platform for the prediction of worsening COVID-19 patients, which uses machine learning based on Korea’s largest COVID-19 data set. The solution enabled unprecedented aid for physicians on patient selection and monitoring. In affirmation, this project was selected as WHO's Digital Health Atlas COVID-19 section, then funded by Google. 

Joon-Nyung now trains as a clinical fellow specializing in stroke management, aiming to revolutionize patient care with precision medicine. In this context, he recently launched a clinical data platform with a focus on empowering clinical researchers with efficient data collection and management. He is also focusing on using advanced technology for clinical research, such as using computer vision for 8 semi-automatic pathologic analyses of stroke thrombi and incorporating machine learning for the prediction of unidentified cardiac diseases in stroke patients.