Dr. Birnbaum is Principal Investigator of an MGH-NYU Medical Center NIH funded R01 grant designed to assess the impact of medical imaging informatics systems on healthcare costs and quality. He has also led abdominal CT phantom research focused on understanding the impact of CT reconstruction algorithms on absolute CT attenuation values. He received the Hounsfield Award from the Society of Computed Body Tomography and Magnetic Resonance in 2005 for this research.