Ph.D. student Sara A. Alsalamah is utilizing the VHealth suite to design artificial intelligence (AI) architectures that combine medical imaging, clinical data, and interactive AI while embedding security and access control as core system components. 

“I view the shift toward virtual hospitals and hub-and-spoke healthcare as the future of medicine, similar to how banking and shopping have largely moved from in-person to digital platforms,” Alsalamah said. “In this model, centralized specialty centers must securely collaborate with local clinics while keeping care coordinated and patient-centered.”

The VHealth suite provides real-world examples of this vision, she said. VHealth-CNN extracts meaning from large amounts of unstructured clinical text. VHealth-MFusion combines chest X-ray images with clinical tabular data to improve diagnostic accuracy and explainability.  VHealth-AC manages secure access and data governance. And VHealth-Bot supports human-in-the-loop decision-making. 

“Together, these models aim to improve early detection, clinical decision-making, and secure cross-institution collaboration while protecting patient privacy,” she said. “I aim to achieve the right balance between AI and human expertise, ensuring that AI acts as a powerful clinical assistant while keeping physicians firmly in the loop.”

Alsalamah’s interest in this area of research was shaped in part by her earlier professional experience working at the Ministry of Health in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, where she gained firsthand insight into real healthcare system challenges. 

“On one hand, I saw how AI has tremendous potential to support physicians, especially in high-demand clinical settings where workload, time pressure, and specialist shortages can affect quality of care,” she said. “On the other hand, I observed how some AI tools could unintentionally deskill physicians by encouraging over-reliance on automated outputs rather than critical clinical judgment.”

This led Alsalamah to focus her Ph.D. work on developing safe, responsible, and human-centered AI solutions that assist clinicians rather than replace them.

She earned both bachelor’s and master’s degrees in applied information technology from the College of Engineering and Computing at George Mason University and said she was drawn to Virginia Tech and the Sanghani Center by their inspiring vision to harness computing for the public good. 

“The center’s emphasis on interdisciplinary collaboration, responsible AI, and real-world impact strongly resonates with my work in digital health and trustworthy data systems. Being part of a community that brings together diverse experts to solve meaningful societal challenges is what makes the Sanghani Center truly distinctive and exciting to me,” said Alsalamah, who is advised by Chang Tien-Lu. “Being part of this community feels both inspiring and empowering.”

Following are three published papers in which she is first author:

·      “Virtual healthcare bot (VHC-Bot): a Person-centered AI chatbot for transforming patient care and healthcare workforce dynamics,”  in Network Modeling Analysis in Health Informatics and Bioinformatics, June 2025.

·      “Building a Patient-centered virtual hospital ecosystem using both access control and CNN-based models,” at 2022 IEEE International Conference on Big Data 

·      “Towards a Patient-Centered Virtual Hospital Ecosystem: A Fine Grained VHealth-AC Model for Hospitals’ Legacy Information Systems,” at 2022 IEEE International Conference on Dependable, Autonomic and Secure Computing (DASC); International Conference on Pervasive Intelligence and Computing (PiCom); International Conference on Cloud and Big Data Computing (CBDCom); and International Conference on Cyber Science and Technology (CyberSciTech). 

Projected to graduate in Spring 2026, Alsalamah plans to return to her home country as assistant professor in the Information Technology Department at the College of Computer and Information Sciences at Al-Imam University in Riyadh, which supported her studies in the United States. 

“I am eager to apply the knowledge and expertise I have acquired here to strengthen academia in Saudi Arabia, contribute to the ongoing development and advancement of its universities, and help tackle real-world healthcare challenges that support the broader progress of healthcare AI in my country,” she said.