Arho Virkki

Chief Analytics Officer at Varha, the Wellbeing Services County of Southwest Finland, and Associate Professor in Medical Mathematics at the University of Turku. His talk shares Nordic lessons on using health data at scale.

Arho Virkki, PhD, MSc(Tech), is Chief Analytics Officer at the Wellbeing Services County of Southwest Finland (Varha) and Associate Professor in Medical Mathematics at the University of Turku. At Auria Health Data Services, Varha's official unit for turning real-world health data into research-ready information, he leads the development of a certified secure processing environment (SPE), Auria Atolli, for scientific research and AI. His work is about putting data-driven diagnostics to work responsibly: turning clinical data into insights clinicians, researchers and industry can actually trust and use.

Background

• Reliable data for AI and diagnostics: architect of Varha's analytical data warehouse for electronic health records; leader of the accredited Atolli secure processing environment offering CPU and GPU computing for AI research on health data.
• Privacy and data protection: statistical disclosure control, pseudonymization and anonymization; member of Findata's High Level Expert Group on anonymization, information security and privacy; lead on several EU projects on synthetic/safe health data (e.g. SHARED, SYNDATE, PHASE IV AI, HealthHub Finland).
• Background in decision support systems: PhD in applied mathematics on modelling, analysis and control of the human respiratory system; research on biometric signal processing and machine learning for sleep-disordered breathing and sleep apnea diagnosis.
• Hands-on across the stack: long experience in statistical modelling and machine learning for decision support, from research science (University of Turku, VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland) to production software (clinical laboratory systems, web-based analytics).

Selected as one of the Top 100 Influencers in Healthcare in Finland (Mediuutiset, 2018); ECCOMAS PhD thesis award finalist (2007).