Ashery Mbilinyi

I am an Assistant Professor and head of the Medical Computer Vision (MCV) lab at the Department of Computer Science at the University of Victoria (UVic). I research computer vision, machine learning, and information retrieval methods to interpret the contents of medical images and their associated clinical data, aiming to augment clinicians’ diagnostics and decision-making processes.

Before joining UVic, I worked as a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of British Columbia (UBC), focusing on multimodal machine learning for cardiovascular disease intervention and management under the mentorship of Prof. Roger Tam. I earned my Ph.D. from the University of Basel, Switzerland, where I had the privilege of working with Prof. Heiko Schuldt and Prof. Volker Roth on Medical Image Retrieval to augment Diagnostic Radiology. Prior to that, I completed my master’s at the Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (JAIST), Japan, and my undergraduate degree at the Dar es Salaam Institute of Technology (DIT), Tanzania.

News

Dec 21, 2025	🎉 Congratulations to our lab member Rishabh Jha, who placed 27th out of 114 teams in the PhysioNet Challenge 2025. His paper, “Automated Chagas Disease Detection from 12-Lead ECGs Using a Residual Network with Robust Preprocessing,” has been accepted at Computing in Cardiology (CinC) 2025, a leading conference in clinical cardiology and cardiovascular physiology computing.
Dec 17, 2025	Google Research spotlighted the Data Science for Health Ideathon across Africa launched as part of our workshop, highlighting the quality of ideas, mentorship, and health-impact focus. Read the spotlight → here
Oct 30, 2025	Our CHIL 2025 white-paper is out.
Sep 02, 2025	Our DS4H workshop at the premier Deep Learning Indaba was a great success.
Aug 08, 2025	Check out my essay on “Human-Centered AI: Transparency, Interpretability, and the Future of Trust” in this newly released book sample.

Selected Publications

The Role of Machine Learning in the Detection of Cardiac Fibrosis in Electrocardiograms: Scoping Review

Julia Handra, Hannah James, Ashery Mbilinyi, and 8 more authors

JMIR Cardio, 2024

Bib PDF

@article{handra2024role,
  title = {The Role of Machine Learning in the Detection of Cardiac Fibrosis in Electrocardiograms: Scoping Review},
  author = {Handra, Julia and James, Hannah and Mbilinyi, Ashery and Moller-Hansen, Ashley and O'Riley, Callum and Andrade, Jason and Deyell, Marc and Hague, Cameron and Hawkins, Nathaniel and Ho, Kendall and others},
  journal = {JMIR Cardio},
  volume = {8},
  number = {1},
  pages = {e60697},
  year = {2024},
  publisher = {JMIR Publications Inc., Toronto, Canada},
  show_bib = {true},
}

The State of Computer Vision Research in Africa

Abdul-Hakeem Omotayo, Ashery Mbilinyi, Lukman Ismaila, and 8 more authors

Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research, 2024

Bib PDF

@article{omotayo2024state,
  title = {The State of Computer Vision Research in Africa},
  author = {Omotayo, Abdul-Hakeem and Mbilinyi, Ashery and Ismaila, Lukman and Turki, Houcemeddine and Abdien, Mahmoud and Gamal, Karim and Tondji, Idriss and Pimi, Yvan and Etori, Naome A and Matar, Marwa M and others},
  journal = {Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research},
  volume = {81},
  pages = {43--69},
  year = {2024},
  show_bib = {true},
}

CheReS: a deep learning-based multi-faceted system for similarity search of chest X-rays

Ashery Mbilinyi, and Heiko Schuldt

In Proceedings of the 37th ACM/SIGAPP Symposium on Applied Computing, 2022

Bib PDF

@inproceedings{mbilinyi2022cheres,
  title = {CheReS: a deep learning-based multi-faceted system for similarity search of chest X-rays},
  author = {Mbilinyi, Ashery and Schuldt, Heiko},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 37th ACM/SIGAPP Symposium on Applied Computing},
  pages = {669--676},
  year = {2022},
  show_bib = {true},
}

Retrieving chest X-rays for differential diagnosis: A deep metric learning approach

Ashery Mbilinyi, and Heiko Schuldt

In 2021 IEEE EMBS International Conference on Biomedical and Health Informatics (BHI), 2021

Bib PDF

@inproceedings{mbilinyi2021retrieving,
  title = {Retrieving chest X-rays for differential diagnosis: A deep metric learning approach},
  author = {Mbilinyi, Ashery and Schuldt, Heiko},
  booktitle = {2021 IEEE EMBS International Conference on Biomedical and Health Informatics (BHI)},
  pages = {1--4},
  year = {2021},
  organization = {IEEE},
  show_bib = {true},
}

Cross-modality medical image retrieval with deep features

Ashery Mbilinyi, and Heiko Schuldt

In 2020 IEEE International Conference on Bioinformatics and Biomedicine (BIBM), 2020

Bib PDF

@inproceedings{mbilinyi2020cross,
  title = {Cross-modality medical image retrieval with deep features},
  author = {Mbilinyi, Ashery and Schuldt, Heiko},
  booktitle = {2020 IEEE International Conference on Bioinformatics and Biomedicine (BIBM)},
  pages = {2632--2639},
  year = {2020},
  organization = {IEEE},
  show_bib = {true},
}