Marzyeh Ghassemi, PhD
Assistant Professor, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Institute for Medical Engineering & Science
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
Canadian CIFAR AI Chair at Vector Institute
Title: Designing Machine Learning Processes For Equitable Health Systems
Abstract
Dr. Marzyeh Ghassemi focuses on creating and applying machine learning to understand and improve health in ways that are robust, private and fair. Dr. Ghassemi will talk about her work trying to train models that do not learn biased rules or recommendations that harm minorities or minoritized populations. The Healthy ML group tackles the many novel technical opportunities for machine learning in health, and works to make important progress with careful application to this domain.
Hoifung Poon, PhD
General Manager at Health Futures of Microsoft Research
Affiliated Professor at the University of Washington Medical School.
Title: Advancing Health at the Speed of AI
Abstract: The dream of precision health is to develop a data-driven, continuous learning system where new health information is instantly incorporated to optimize care delivery and accelerate biomedical discovery. In reality, however, the health ecosystem is plagued by overwhelming unstructured data and unscalable manual processing. Self-supervised AI such as large language models (LLMs) can supercharge structuring of biomedical data and accelerate transformation towards precision health. In this talk, I’ll present our research progress on biomedical AI for precision health, spanning biomedical LLMs, multi-modal learning, and causal discovery. This enables us to extract knowledge from tens of millions of publications, structure real-world data for millions of cancer patients, and apply the extracted knowledge and real-world evidence to advancing precision oncology in deep partnerships with real-world stakeholders.
Despina Kontos, PhD
Matthew J. Wilson Professor of Research Radiology II
Associate Vice-Chair for Research, Department of Radiology
Perelman School of Medicine
University of Pennsylvania
Title: Radiomics and Radiogenomics: The Role of Imaging, Machine Learning, and AI, as a Biomarker for Cancer Prognostication and Therapy Response Evaluation
Abstract: Cancer is a heterogeneous disease, with known inter-tumor and intra-tumor heterogeneity in solid tumors. Established histopathologic prognostic biomarkers generally acquired from a tumor biopsy may be limited by sampling variation. Radiomics is an emerging field with the potential to leverage the whole tumor via non-invasive sampling afforded by medical imaging to extract high throughput, quantitative features for personalized tumor characterization. Identifying imaging phenotypes via radiomics analysis and understanding their relationship with prognostic markers and patient outcomes can allow for a non-invasive assessment of tumor heterogeneity. Recent studies have shown that intrinsic radiomic phenotypes of tumor heterogeneity for cancer may have independent prognostic value when predicting disease aggressiveness and recurrence. The independent prognostic value of imaging heterogeneity phenotypes suggests that radiogenomic phenotypes can provide a non-invasive characterization of tumor heterogeneity to augment genomic assays in precision prognosis and treatment.
Daguang Xu, PhD
Senior Research Manager
NVIDIA Healthcare
Title: Industrial Applied Research in Healthcare and Federated Learning at NVIDIA
Abstract: As the market leader in deep learning and parallel computing, NVIDIA is fully committed to advancing applied research in medical imaging. Our goal is to revolutionize the capabilities of medical doctors and radiologists by equipping them with powerful tools and applications based on deep learning. We firmly believe that the integration of deep learning and accelerated AI will have a profound impact on the life sciences, medicine, and the healthcare industry as a whole. To drive this transformative process, NVIDIA is actively democratizing deep learning through the provision of a comprehensive AI computing platform specifically designed for the healthcare community. These GPU-accelerated solutions not only promote collaboration but also prioritize the security of each institution’s information. By doing so, we are fostering a collective effort in harnessing the potential of deep learning to benefit healthcare.
During this talk, I will showcase remarkable research achievements accomplished by NVIDIA’s deep learning in medical imaging team. This includes breakthroughs in segmentation, self-supervised learning, federated learning, and other related areas. Additionally, I will provide insights into the exciting avenues of research that our team is currently exploring.
Negar Golestani, PhD
Postdoctoral Research Fellow
Department of Radiology
Stanford University
Title: AI in Radiology-Pathology Fusion Towards Precise Breast Cancer Detection
Abstract: Breast cancer is a global public health concern with various treatment options based on tumor characteristics. Pathological examination of excised tissue after surgery provides important information for treatment decisions. This pathology processing involving the manual selection of representative sections for histological examination is time-consuming and subjective, which can lead to potential sampling errors. Accurately identifying residual tumors is a challenging task, which highlights the need for systematic or assisted methods. Radiology-pathology registration is essential for developing deep-learning algorithms to automate cancer detection on radiology images. However, aligning faxitron and histopathology images is difficult due to content and resolution differences, tissue deformation, artifacts, and imprecise correspondence. We propose a novel deep learning-based pipeline for affine registration of faxitron images (x-ray representations of macrosections of ex-vivo breast tissue) with their corresponding histopathology images. Our model combines convolutional neural networks (CNN) and vision transformers (ViT), capturing local and global information from the entire tissue macrosection and its segments. This integrated approach enables simultaneous registration and stitching of image segments, facilitating segment-to-macrosection registration through a puzzling-based mechanism. To overcome the limitations of multi-modal ground truth data, we train the model using synthetic mono-modal data in a weakly supervised manner. The trained model successfully performs multi-modal registration, outperforms existing baselines, including deep learning-based and iterative models, and is approximately 200 times faster than the iterative approach. The application of proposed registration method allows for the precise mapping of pathology labels onto radiology images, thereby establishing ground truth labels for training classification and detection models on radiological data. This work bridges the gap in current research and clinical workflow, offering potential improvements in efficiency and accuracy for breast cancer evaluation and streamlining pathology workflow.
Jean Benoit Delbrouck, PhD
Research Scientist
Department of Radiology
Stanford University
Title: Generating Accurate and Factually Correct Medical Text
Abstract: Generating factually correct medical text is of utmost importance due to several reasons. Firstly, patient safety is heavily dependent on accurate information as medical decisions are often made based on the information provided. Secondly, trust in AI as a reliable tool in the medical field is essential, and this trust can only be established by generating accurate and reliable medical text. Lastly, medical research also relies heavily on accurate information for meaningful results.
Recent studies have explored new approaches for generating medical text from images or findings, ranging from pretraining to Reinforcement Learning, and leveraging expert annotations. However, a potential game changer in the field is the integration of GPT models in pipelines for generating factually correct medical text for research or production purposes.