Staff Profile

Dr Ponnuraja C

Designation: Scientist F

Division/Unit: Statistics

Email: ponnuraja[dot]c[at]icmr[dot]gov[dot]in

Educational Qualification

MSc PhD

Personal Statement

PhD in Statistics with over 27 years of experience in clinical trial research, data analysis and statistical programming. Specializes in tuberculosis research, time-to-event analysis, and survival models, with expertise in competing risks and epidemiological methods. Provides statistical support for clinical and public health studies, contributing to both independent and collaborative publications. Actively mentors PhD scholars and trains students in biostatistics, data mining, and healthcare analytics. Currently engaged in AI-based tuberculosis diagnosis using chest X-ray imaging. Research interests include disease burden estimation and epidemiological studies of infectious and non-infectious diseases in India.

Research Focus

• Biostatistics & Clinical Trial Methodology

• Tuberculosis (TB) Research Analytics

• Survival Analysis & Time-to-Event Modeling

• Data Science & Healthcare Analytics

• Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare

Ongoing projects as Principal investigator

• Development of Artificial Intelligence Tool for Screening Detection of Pulmonary Tuberculosis Using Chest XRay

• Gold Standard Datasets on Tuberculosis with Radiological images

Significant Publications

• Ahamed Fayaz S, Babu L, Paridayal L, Vasantha M, Paramasivam P, Sundarakumar K, Ponnuraja C. Machine learning algorithms to predict treatment success for patients with pulmonary tuberculosis. PLoS One. 2024 Oct 16;19(10):e0309151. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0309151. PMID: 39413064; PMCID: PMC11482692

• Manikandan, P., Durga, U. & Ponnuraja, C. An integrative machine learning framework for classifying SEER breast cancer. Sci Rep 13, 5362 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/ s41598-023-32029-1

• Pranay Sinha, Chinnaiyan Ponnuraja, Nikhil Gupte, Senbagavalli Prakash Babu, Samyra R Cox, Sonali Sarkar, Vidya Mave, Mandar Paradkar, Chelsie Cintron, S Govindarajan, Aarti Kinikar, Nadesan Priya, Sanjay Gaikwad, Balamugesh Thangakunam, Arutselvi Devarajan, Mythili Dhanasekaran, Jeffrey A Tornheim, Amita Gupta, Padmini Salgame, Devashyam Jesudas Christopher, Hardy Kornfeld, Vijay Viswanathan, Jerrold J Ellner, C Robert Horsburgh, Jr, Akshay N Gupte, Chandrasekaran Padmapriyadarsini, Natasha S Hochberg, on behalf of the Regional Prospective Observational Research on Tuberculosis India Consortium, Impact of Undernutrition on Tuberculosis Treatment Outcomes in India: A Multicenter, Prospective, Cohort Analysis, Clinical Infectious Diseases, 2022;, ciac915, https://doi.org/10.1093/cid/ciac915

• Aswathi Pootheri, Ponnuraja Chinnaiyan, Narmada Ashok, Radha Saraswathy, Association between ambient air pollution and increased risk of respiratory diseases in Vellore and Ranipet, Tamil Nadu, India: A retrospective study, Environmental Pollution, Volume 385,2025,127051, ISSN 0269-7491,https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envpol.2025.127051.

• Ahamed, Shaik Fayaz, Sundarakumar Karuppasamy, and Ponnuraja Chinnaiyan. 2025. "Clinical Text Classification for Tuberculosis Diagnosis Using Natural Language Processing and Deep Learning Model with Statistical Feature Selection Technique" Informatics 12, no. 3: 64.