CS342 · Building for Digital Health
A project course for computer science students and School of Medicine faculty building digital platforms that directly impact healthcare or clinical research.
Vasiliki (Vicky) Bikia
Machine Learning in fitness and health · Apple
Turning health data into useful intelligence
I am a Senior Machine Learning Engineer at Apple, on the Applied Sensing & Health team, based in Cupertino, CA.
Before Apple, I was a postdoctoral researcher in Biomedical Data Science (Daneshjou Lab) and the Institute for Human-Centered AI at Stanford, where I worked on multimodal learning and automated evaluation at scale, from efficient medical imaging models (Med-REDUCE) to automated validation of clinical text (MedVAL, SAFRAN). Earlier at Stanford, I was part of Biodesign Digital Health at the Mussallem Center for Biodesign, where I developed the Spezi Data Pipeline for interoperable wearable and EHR data workflows under the mentorship of Dr. Oliver Aalami.
I hold a Ph.D. in Biomedical Engineering from EPFL (2021), advised by Prof. Nikolaos Stergiopulos, where I developed non-invasive cardiovascular monitoring tools that combine machine learning with physics-based modeling. I received my diploma in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (2017).
News
- Med-REDUCE is featured by Stanford Biomedical Data Science: “Medical AI: Doing More With Less”.
- I was part of the team behind STEWARD (Safety, Trust, Evaluation and Watchdog for Embedded Agentic care Delivery), which was awarded up to $14.9M by ARPA-H to build a monitoring tool for agentic AI systems in cardiovascular care.
- Joined Apple's Applied Sensing & Health team in Cupertino, CA, as a Senior Machine Learning Engineer!
- Med-REDUCE was accepted to Medical Image Analysis! We show that compact, distilled vision models stay robust under low image resolution across dermatology, histopathology and radiology.
- Our patent System and Methods for Real-Time Noninvasive Estimation of Cardiovascular Parameters Using Machine Learning was officially issued by the US Patent and Trademark Office!
- MedVAL, on expert-level validation of medical text with language models, is out in npj Digital Medicine! Well done, Asad Aali, for leading this work.
Show older news
- I am again serving as one of the chairs of the CHIL Unconference: Health AI Builders v.2 in Seattle, WA.
- My paper on the Spezi Data Pipeline for FHIR-based digital health data workflows is published in npj Digital Medicine. The open-source library, spezi-data-pipeline, provides interoperable data pipelines for digital health data.
- SycEval, on evaluating sycophancy in large language models, was accepted to AIES 2025 (AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society). Congrats to Aaron Fanous for leading this work!
- Our review of AI in dermatology research and drug discovery is out in Dermatologic Clinics.
- Our paper was accepted to the GenAI4Health Workshop at NeurIPS 2025. See you in San Diego!
- Our review on integrating AI into dermatological cancer screening and diagnosis is published in the Annual Review of Biomedical Data Science.
- Our in-vivo evaluation of a compliance-matching aortic graft in a swine model is out in the Journal of Biomechanics.
- My paper on gradient-boosting inverse modeling for stroke volume, tested on patient thermodilution data, is published in Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence.
- Selected as one of the Emerson Consequential Scholars in the first postdoc cohort at Stanford.
- I am serving as the chair of the first CHIL Unconference: Health AI Builders in Berkeley, CA.
- Our in-silico validation of non-invasive arterial compliance estimation is published in Physiological Research.
- The VascAgeNet roadmap for developing vascular ageing technologies is out in Physiological Measurement.
- Our numerical study on how amputation alters arterial stiffness and hemodynamics is published in Scientific Reports.
- Honored to be one of the MIT Rising Stars and to join the workshop in Boston, MA.
- Awarded a HAI Postdoctoral Fellowship, sponsored by Stanford University's Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI).
- My paper on the theory and applications of the central diastolic pressure decay time constant is out in Scientific Reports.
- We are organizing the mini-symposium Virtual Subjects for Cardiovascular Research at CMBE24 in Arlington, VA. Abstract submission is open!
- Our study on using smartwatches to identify arrhythmias in children is published in Communications Medicine.
- My paper on the similarity between aortic and carotid diastolic pressure decay is out in Scientific Reports.
- Our VascAgeNet review of arterial pulse wave modeling for vascular-age studies is published in the American Journal of Physiology – Heart and Circulatory Physiology.
- Our paper on the design and computational optimization of compliance-matching aortic grafts is out in Frontiers in Bioengineering and Biotechnology.
- My paper on estimating cardiac output from an uncalibrated radial pressure waveform is published in Frontiers in Bioengineering and Biotechnology.
- Our paper quantifying the phenomena behind reflective photoplethysmography is out in Bioengineering.
- Our paper on the prognostic implications of the new pulmonary hypertension definition after TAVR is published in the Journal of Clinical Medicine.
- Our paper on arterial wave reflection in aortic valve stenosis is out in Frontiers in Cardiovascular Medicine.
- Our numerical study of arterial stiffness in renal disease is published in Frontiers in Physiology.
- My paper validating a non-invasive inverse method for stroke volume is out in Frontiers in Physiology.
- I defended my Ph.D. at EPFL!
- My paper on estimating end-systolic elastance from the brachial pressure waveform with deep learning is published in Frontiers in Bioengineering and Biotechnology.
- My review on machine learning for assessing vascular ageing is out in the European Heart Journal – Digital Health.
- My paper on assessing arterial compliance from the carotid pressure waveform is published in the American Journal of Physiology – Heart and Circulatory Physiology.
- Our model-based study of left ventricular contractility and arterial hemodynamics is out in PLOS ONE.
- Our modeling analysis of decreased aortic compliance and central hemodynamics is published in Frontiers in Physiology.
- My paper on estimating aortic impedance and arterial compliance from regional pulse wave velocities is out in Frontiers in Bioengineering and Biotechnology.
- My paper on AI-based estimation of end-systolic elastance from arm pressure is published in Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence.
- Our in-vivo validation of a non-invasive method for end-systolic elastance is out in the American Journal of Physiology – Heart and Circulatory Physiology.
- Our paper on the acute effects of TAVR on ventricular–aortic interaction is published in the American Journal of Physiology – Heart and Circulatory Physiology.
- Our 1D computational model of diastolic dysfunction is out in the American Journal of Physiology – Heart and Circulatory Physiology.
- My paper on machine learning for non-invasive estimation of aortic hemodynamics and cardiac contractility is published in Scientific Reports.
- My paper on the impact of heart rate on pulse wave velocity is out in the Journal of Hypertension.
- Our paper on how proximal aortic elongation affects estimates of aortic distensibility is published in Biomechanics and Modeling in Mechanobiology.
- My paper on non-invasive cardiac output and central systolic pressure from cuff pressure and pulse wave velocity was accepted to the IEEE Journal of Biomedical and Health Informatics.
- Our paper on non-uniform aortic stiffening in physiological ageing is published in the American Journal of Physiology – Heart and Circulatory Physiology.
Selected publications
All publications →Teaching & mentoring
BIOENG-312 · Fluid Mechanics
Fundamentals of fluids for engineering students: statics, Bernoulli equation, kinematics, control volume and differential analysis, dimensional analysis, and viscous pipe flow.
ME-481 · Biomechanics of the Cardiovascular System
Cardiovascular physiology through blood biophysics, cardiac mechanics, hemodynamics, and biomechanics of the arterial and venous systems.