Center for
Global Health

Associate Scholar

Languages: English (Proficient), Yoruba (Native)

BIO STATEMENT

Maruf Adewole, PhD, is a Medical Physicist and a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania. He doubles as the Executive Director of the Medical Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (MAI Lab) based in Lagos, Nigeria. His work focuses on advancing AI-driven medical imaging solutions for cancer diagnosis in resource-constrained settings. Through initiatives like BraTS-Africa, ABreast, and SPARK Academy, he promotes global health equity by curating inclusive datasets, developing ML models, and building local AI capacity. His research bridges radiomics, oncology, and open science, aiming to improve cancer care accessibility and outcomes across Africa.

Recent Global Health Projects

BraTS-Africa Dataset and Challenge aimed to enable AI solutions for the segmentation of Brain tumors in African patient. The dataset extracted from various diagnostic institutions from Africa features cases from patients diagnosed with Glioma. The challenge which started in 2023 has garnered over 30 ML methods for brain tumor segmentation in underserved regions.

SPARK is an AI and Medical Image computation training program that utilized the teach-try-use approach to turn young Africans from amateur to professionals. The program has graduated over 300 participants since it's commencement in 2023.

Select Publications

Udunna C. Anazodo, Maruf Adewole, and Farouk Dako (2022). AI for Population and Global Health in Radiology. Radiology: Artificial Intelligence 2022 4:4

Adewole, Maruf et al. “The Brain Tumor Segmentation (BraTS) Challenge 2023: Glioma Segmentation in Sub-Saharan Africa Patient Population (BraTS-Africa).” ArXiv arXiv:2305.19369v1. 30 May. 2023 Preprint.

Last Updated: 09 May 2025