Safety · Ordinary People
The radiologist who saw intimate partner violence coming years before anyone said a word
Bharti Khurana · Boston, Massachusetts
Asked whether they felt unsafe in their relationship, patients often said no. Bharti Khurana went looking for the answer in their X-rays instead.
The person and the place
Dr. Bharti Khurana is an emergency radiologist at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, and the founder of its Trauma Imaging Research and Innovation Center. She reads the images that decide whether a patient gets admitted or sent home.
The problem Bharti cared about
In 2016, on her way out of a trauma hackathon, she heard a nurse practitioner talking about intimate partner violence, and something landed. "For non-accidental trauma in children, we do such an excellent job," she told CBS Boston. "And then, when it comes to adults, we were not doing anything. So, I got motivated." Every patient gets asked whether they feel unsafe in their relationship. Many who are say no.
The agency moment
Rather than wait for anyone to disclose, Khurana went after the answer through the pictures she already had. The patterns were sitting on the film: mid-facial fractures, injuries to the orbital bones around the eye, and the particular break in the forearm bone near the pinky that happens when a person raises an arm to shield their face. She and her team built AIRS, a decision-support tool that reads those patterns alongside a patient's clinical history and hands the clinician an assessment while they are still looking at the image.
What changed, with evidence
The team published its evaluation in npj Women's Health in March 2026. Working from the records of 841 patients and comparing them against 5,212 others, they measured their strongest model at an AUC of 0.88, a score of how cleanly a model separates two groups rather than a percentage of correct calls, and it stayed between 0.82 and 0.88 across three further groups of patients. At the threshold the team chose, the model reached above 73% sensitivity and specificity. On average it saw the risk more than three years ahead of the day a patient asked for help. By late 2024 the hospital was putting the tool's current iteration to work in its emergency department and at some primary care sites.
The move worth copying
She noticed her field did something carefully for one group of patients and almost nothing for another, and treated that gap as hers to work on. She also built for the patient who still says no. AIRS comes with what the team calls "empower guides" and a QR code a patient can scan instead of carrying home a pamphlet that might anger an abuser, and any flag lives in a "safe zone" visible only to the patient and their clinicians, never in the patient portal. The team is clear that the model needs testing in broader populations before wider clinical use, and that it was never built to diagnose anyone. Know someone who fixed the gap everyone else stepped around? Feed the scout at goodinprogress.org.
"The goal is never to force disclosure, but to help clinicians communicate with patients in a supportive way and to connect them with resources and support." — Dr. Bharti Khurana, NIH Research Matters
Sources
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