About Dr. Amina Khalpey | The Red Line

Dr. Amina Khalpey

Dr. Amina Khalpey

Amina Khalpey is a plasma physicist who began her career using plasma treatment to modify the surfaces of artificial vascular grafts. That work, at the interface between artificial material and human blood, shaped how she thinks about technologies entering medicine, including artificial intelligence.

She holds a PhD in plasma physics and materials science and an MS in biomedical engineering. Her doctoral work focused on plasma polymerization, polymer surface modification, and biomaterials for medical applications, including silicone endothelialization for vascular grafts.

Her career has included leadership and programmatic roles at MIT, the Whitehead Institute, and Harvard, spanning international research partnerships, intellectual property, technology translation, and humanitarian medicine.

She is a member of the COMPASS-AI Panel of Experts (Community of Multidisciplinary Professionals Advancing Safe and Successful AI Implementation in Clinical Practice), an initiative funded under the EU4Health Programme 2021 to 2027 as part of the European Union’s Apply AI Strategy. Through that role, she contributes to FUTURE-AI 2.0, the next version of the guideline for the responsible implementation, validation, monitoring, and governance of clinical AI.

She is also President of the ATARI Foundation and Co-Director of the Khalpey AI Lab, where she leads AI work in cardiac care, including heart-rate variability and waveform technologies for sudden cardiac death, atrial fibrillation, and silent hypoxia.

Dr. Khalpey received no funding from COMPASS-AI, the European Union or the European Health and Digital Executive Agency (HaDEA) for writing The Red Line or for creating this site. The views expressed in The Red Line and on this site are her own and do not necessarily reflect those of COMPASS-AI, the European Union or HaDEA. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.

Praise for The Red Line

“This book names the boundary others avoid. The problem is not building more advanced models; it is deciding where they stop. The Red Line brings a disciplined, systems-level view to AI in healthcare and draws a hard truth: human judgment is not replaceable, only supportable.”

Jepson Taylor
Founder & CEO, VEOX.ai
Former Chief AI Strategist, Dataiku

“As a surgeon who has spent a career weaving AI into the operating room, I have seen the incredible promise of these tools, and the terrifying ways they can drift, degrade, or ‘reason’ in ways we simply cannot interrogate. I have long argued that the human clinician must remain the ultimate decision-maker, but The Red Line is the first book I have read that takes that principle and applies it with such lucid, unyielding force to the entirety of medicine. Dr. Khalpey writes with the precision of a physicist and the conscience of a clinician. She names the hard truths that many in our field are still trying to avoid: that systems entering our hospitals must be made legible, auditable, and answerable before they ever touch a patient.”

Professor Andrew A. Gumbs MD, MSc, MBA, PhD(c), FACS
Editor-in-Chief, Artificial Intelligence Surgery
President, Artificial Intelligence Organization for the Next Generation of Surgery
Director of Artificial Intelligence Surgery
Hôpital Antoine Béclère, Paris

“This book does not ask us to slow AI down. It asks us to decide, before the next deployment, who remains accountable when the algorithm is wrong. AI in medicine is already an allocation engine, shaping who gets treated, who gets monitored, and who gets denied. When the cost of optimizing the wrong metric is not a readmission but a life, the line this book draws is not optional. Every clinician, device maker, and health system leader needs to understand why.”

Patrick NJ Schnegelsberg
Former CEO, Picard Medical and SynCardia Systems

“AI’s impact on medicine is happening now. It holds great promise, but also risks turning healthcare into an opaque, algorithmic, and even dangerous endeavor devoid of trust and the human spirit. Dr. Khalpey defines a red line to ensure AI becomes a useful tool to enhance medical care—in the age of AI, she correctly refocuses medicine on the physician-patient relationship.”

Darren Sigal, MD
Director of GI Oncology
Scripps MD Anderson Cancer Center

“What makes this book stand out is its refusal to oversimplify. It treats data systems the way they actually behave: complex, influential, and often misunderstood once deployed. The focus on real accountability, not just performance metrics, is what gives this work weight. It raises the standard for how AI should be built and evaluated in healthcare.”

Nicholas King
Founder & CEO, Data Kinetic
Former executive at Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, and DataRobot

“This book asks the question the industry has been avoiding: what happens when technology moves faster than our ethics, our safeguards, and our willingness to be accountable? Dr. Khalpey does more than raise the alarm. She draws the line.”

Cosmo Smith
Managing Partner, Origin Commercial Ventures

“AI and digital transformation achieve their greatest impact when they empower clinicians rather than attempt to replace them. This book thoughtfully outlines the advantages that technology can bring to healthcare, and illustrates how, when implemented responsibly, it enables clinicians to work more efficiently and ultimately provide care to a greater number of patients.”

Harsh Dharwad
President & CEO
Nihon Kohden Digital Health Solutions

“The Red Line shares the blueprint for how the healthcare industry can responsibly deploy AI to keep patients and providers at the center of care.”

Dr. Anmin Zheng
Chairman, NovelBeam Technology
Chairman, Meribel Diagnostics
Co-Founder & Chairman, Meribel Health

“Building cancer centers, cancer hospitals, and cancer clinical practices requires you to ask the same question every year: where is medicine going, and are we ahead of it or behind it? The Red Line answers that question for our generation. Amina Khalpey brings both the perspective of someone who has worked at the edge of what is technically possible and the human dimension that data alone will never capture. She has written something rare: a book about artificial intelligence that never loses sight of the patient. I recommend it without reservation to every hospital leader, as well as physicians and students entering medicine.”

Michael A. Caligiuri, MD
Former President and Physician-in-Chief
City of Hope National Medical Center

“This book makes a case for AI in healthcare as a powerful assistive tool—one that benefits enormously from better data and more disciplined modeling, but can never replace human judgment, accountability, or care. Most importantly, it establishes the need for a firm ‘red line’ as an operating discipline. In a field where consequences are measured in lives, this insistence on discipline is what makes innovation worthy of trust.”

Todd LaPorte
CEO, HonorHealth

Do not confuse a system’s ability to produce an answer with its right to close the question. In many fields, an answer can be enough. In medicine, the next question may be the diagnosis.