Samson Jarso

Dr. Samson Jarso is an Associate Research Engineer and a Lecturer in the Johns Hopkins University Department of Biomedical Engineering. Additionally, he formerly served as a Visiting Professor in Biomedical Engineering at Mbarara University of Science and Technology in Uganda. His work sits at the intersection of biomedical engineering, quantitative imaging, and clinical decision support for cancer care in low-resource settings. Building on longstanding commitments to capacity building and innovation in Africa, his current research focuses on three closely related areas: first, the development of clinical decision-support tools and biologically informed risk models for cancer diagnosis, screening, and treatment monitoring in low-resource settings; second, biomedical engineering design directed toward affordable, context-appropriate devices for constrained clinical environments; and third, quantitative clinical and cellular imaging feature development, including imaging-informed feature selection and multimodal biomarker discovery to support clinically actionable decision-making. His recent and emerging work reflects these priorities across multiple cancer contexts, including cervical cancer screening through digital cytology and whole-slide image analysis, Burkitt lymphoma risk modeling through multi-omics and pathway-based computational pipelines, prostate cancer care access research in Uganda, and earlier work on liquid-biopsy-based decision support for treatment planning and monitoring in breast cancer.

Dr. Jarso’s academic training is grounded in physics, biophysics, and advanced imaging science. He earned a B.S. in Physics from Georgetown University, an M.S. in Physics from the University of California, Santa Cruz, and a Ph.D. in Biophysics from the University of California, Berkeley. He then completed postdoctoral training at the F.M. Kirby Research Center for Functional Brain Imaging at Johns Hopkins University. This training provided the technical foundation for his later work in MR imaging, biomedical engineering, translational research, and quantitative approaches to clinical inference.

His past research interests include MRI radiofrequency coil design, ex vivo metabolomic studies using high-resolution magic angle spinning NMR, functional MRI studies of acute and sub-acute stroke recovery, and multi-parametric MR imaging for brain tumor characterization. His CV also reflects prior work in clinical translational imaging research on brain function and structure, hardware integration and imaging pipeline development, and machine-learning-oriented analysis of multi-parametric MR images for tumor re-stratification. Across these earlier areas, a consistent theme has been the use of advanced measurement and analytic methods to extract clinically meaningful information from complex biological and imaging data.

Education History

• PhD, BioPhysics, University of California Berkeley

Work Experience

Adjunct Faculty, JHU Whiting School of Engineering, Engineering for Professionals

Publications

Shinohara RT, Sweeney EM, Goldsmith J, Shiee N, Mateen FJ, Calabresi PA, Jarso S, Pham DL, Reich DS, Crainiceanu C, Corrigendum to “Statistical normalization techniques for magnetic resonance imaging” Neuroimage Clin. 2015 Feb 24;7:848

Shinohara R. T., Sweeney E. M., Goldsmith J, Shiee N, Mateen F, Calabresi P, Jarso S, Pham D, Reich D, and Crainiceanu C, Normalization Techniques for Statistical Inference from Magnetic Resonance Imaging. NeuroImage Clin., 6 (2014) 9–19
Jarso S, Li M, Faria A, Davis C, Leigh R, Sebastian R, Tsapkini K, Mori S, Hillis AE. Distinct Mechanisms and Timing of Language Recovery after Stroke, Cogn. Neuropsychol. 2013; 30(7-8):454-75
Leigh R, Oishi K, Hsu J, Lindquist M, Gottesman RF, Jarso S, Crainiceanu C, Mori S, Hillis AE Acute lesions that impair emotional empathy, Brain. 2013 Aug;136(Pt 8):2539-49

Zaca D, Jarso S, Pillai J, Role of Semantic Paradigms for Optimization of Language Mapping in Clinical fMRI Studies American Journal of Neuroradiology 2013 Oct;34(10): 1966-71

Landman BA, Huang AJ, Gifford A, Vikram DS, Lim IA, Farrell JA, Bogovic JA, Hua J, Chen M, Jarso S, Smith SA, Joel S, Mori S, Pekar JJ, Barker PB, Prince JL, van Zijl PC. Mutli-Parametric Neuroimaging Reproducibility: A 3T Resource Study Neuroimage. 2011 Feb 14;54(4):2854-66

Zektzer AS, Swanson MG, Jarso S, Nelson SJ, Vigneron DB, Kurhanewicz, Improved signal to noise in high-resolution magic angle spinning total correlation spectroscopy studies of prostate tissues using rotor-synchronized adiabatic pulses. J. Magn. Reson. Med., 2005 Jan;53(1):41-8.

Swanson MG, Zektzer AS, Tabatabai ZL, Simko J, Jarso S, Keshari KR, Schmitt L, Carroll PR, Shinohara K, Vigneron DB, Kurhanewicz J. Quantitative analysis of prostate metabolites using 1H HR-MAS spectroscopy. J. Magn. Reson. Med., 2006 Jun;55(6):1257-64.

Rajan SS, Patt RH, Jarso S, Mellusi M, Carvlin M, Lossef S. An Extended-Length Coil Design for Peripheral MR Angiography. J. Magn. Reson. Im. 1991;9(4):493-5.

Honors and Awards

• US Department of State Fulbright Grant Scholarship (2018)
• US Department of State Fulbright Grant Scholarship (2017)

Professional Organizations

Society for Medical Decision Making
Biomedical Engineering Society
Biophysical Society