The radiologist who saw intimate partner violence coming years before anyone said a word
Boston, Massachusetts · Bharti Khurana
Published July 26, 2026
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 story
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 she cared about
She was leaving a trauma hackathon in 2016 when a nurse practitioner started 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.
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 88% accuracy, flagging risk more than three years before a patient sought help, and it held between 82 and 88% across three further groups of patients. By late 2024 the tool's current iteration was being implemented in the emergency department at Brigham and Women's and at some primary care sites.
"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
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Sources last verified July 28, 2026.