2022 Biomedical Informatics Seminars

December 2, 2022

Wathsala Widanagamaachchi, PhD, BS Research Associate at Division of Epidemiology, University of Utah, BASIC, VA Salt Lake City Health Care System.

Abstract: Understanding the patient diagnostic process over time (i.e., patient diagnosis paths) can provide key information and insights for improving clinical care. Lately, application of data visualization and visual analytics to healthcare data has become increasingly popular due to its usefulness. In this talk, I will present a novel flexible visualization and analysis framework for exploring patient diagnosis paths. Along with an interactive view of patient diagnosis paths, supplementary visualizations, various filtering and selection techniques are also integrated into our visualization system to allow quick exploration of different hypotheses. Application of the system is demonstrated with a case study in healthcare to explore infection-based patient diagnosis paths.   

Bio: Wathsala is a Research Associate at the Division of Epidemiology, University of Utah. She received a PhD in Computing (in Graphics Track) from University of Utah in 2017. Her research interests lie in data analysis and visualization. Specifically, she is interested in exploring and developing generalized data analysis and visualization solutions that can be applied across a wide variety of application domains. At her current position, her focus is to apply advanced analytics and informatics methods in creative, cross-disciplinary activities in an effort to improve clinical care. Wathsala came to the US in 2009 after having grown up in Sri Lanka.

November 25 , 2022

Class Cancelled: Thanksgiving 

November 18, 2022

Josh Pevnick, MD, Associate Professor of Medicine, Associate Professor, Biomedical Sciences, Co-Director, Division of Informatics, Cedars Sinai Health System. "Beyond Modeling: The Role of Informatics in Advancing Healthcare Knowledge."

Keith Feldman, PhD, Department of Pediatrics, Children's Mercy Hospital, Kansas City. "Beyond Modeling: The Role of Informatics in Advancing Healthcare Knowledge."

Abstract: “Big Data” in healthcare has offered an alluring goal of improving patient care, reducing costs, and advancing our understanding of human health. To date, electronic health record data has acted as a foundation for data mining, machine learning, and statistical techniques to drive precision health initiatives, finding success in a myriad of analytical tasks at an efficiency and scale individuals can no longer parallel. Yet the divide between academic research and clinical practice continues to grow, and it has become clear the availability of data and models alone cannot ensure their effective use, nor provide meaningful impact for those who need them most. This talk will highlight the traditional role of informatics as a foundation for evidence-based medicine, in which work has focused on applying historical data to future situations. Then we will discuss the potential to more broadly advance healthcare knowledge by embracing a wider array of learning objectives, utilizing a team-science approach to aid practitioners in understanding, analyzing, evaluating and synthesizing the wealth of digital information available today.  

Bios: Joshua Pevnick, MD, MSHS, is an Associate Professor of Medicine in the Division of General Internal Medicine at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, California. He has a secondary Associate Professor appointment and serves as Co-Director of the Division of Informatics in the Department of Biomedical Sciences. Dr. Pevnick studies health information technology, with areas of focus including medication management, inter-physician communication, patient-generated data, health information exchange, and clinical decision support. He currently has R01 funding from the National Institutes of Health (National Institute on Aging) to study improved medication management for older adults at hospital discharge. Dr. Pevnick is also the Director of Cedars-Sinai’s Clinical Informatics Fellowship Subspecialty Training Program and mentors several NIH-funded investigators.

Keith Feldman, PhD is a Research Faculty at Children's Mercy Kansas City in the Division of Health Services and Outcomes Research, and an Assistant Professor of Pediatrics at UMKC School of Medicine. His research explores the ways in which computational techniques can aid practitioners and researchers in understanding variability within patient conditions and outcomes. Seeking to identify evidenced-based risk factors and treatment patterns to inform the quality and effectiveness of care. Working closely with multidisciplinary teams, his work is fundamentally motivated by the notion of augmentation, not automation. Where rather than utilizing computation to replicate healthcare decisions, he aims to augment the existing skillsets of those engaged in healthcare by contextualizing the wealth of available data. Broadly seeking to determine what information, if available, would improve decisions relevant to their role. His work is funded by Frontiers CITI, an NIH supplement for improving AI readiness of data, and philanthropic programs.

November 11, 2022

Class Cancelled: Veterans Day

November 4, 2022

Robert McDougal, PhD, Assistant Professor of Biostatistics, Co-Training Director, Health Informatics MS, Yale University.

October 28, 2022

Luca Bonomi, PhD  Assistant Professor of Biomedical Informatics, Vanderbilt University. "Privacy technology to support time-to-event analysis."

Abstract: Health data are central in modern biomedical informatics applications, as they hold great promises for improving patient care and accelerating research. However, privacy aspects need to be adequately considered to ensure a responsible and sustainable use of these data in real-world efforts. In this talk, we will focus on time-to-event data analysis and how privacy technology can benefit biomedical informatics by enabling institutions to leverage distributed data and support broad data sharing.  

Bio: Dr. Luca Bonomi is an Assistant Professor of Biomedical Informatics at Vanderbilt University. He received a Ph.D. in Computer Science and Informatics from Emory University. Before joining Vanderbilt, he completed postdoctoral training at the Department of Biomedical Informatics (DBMI) at the University of California San Diego (UCSD). His research aims at developing rigorous privacy-protecting technologies for facilitating data-driven biomedical applications. Dr. Bonomi is a recipient of a K99/R00 grant by the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

October 21, 2022

Lisa Roteinstein, MD, MBA,  Assistant Professor of Medicine Harvard University, Medical Director of Population Health at Brigham and Women's Hospital, Harvard Medical School. "Using the EHR to Understand Patterns & Opportunities in Ambulatory Care Delivery."

Abstract: Dr. Roteinstein's presentation will focus on what we can learn from the electronic health record (EHR) about differences in patterns of care delivery by specialty, physician characteristics, use of various technologies, and how ambulatory care is organized. It will also delve into how the time spent on the EHR influences quality of care, and how we optimize the time spent on the EHR.  

Bio: Dr. Rotenstein is a primary care physician, healthcare leader, and researcher whose work focuses on care delivery innovation, physician wellbeing, and gender issues in medicine. She is an Assistant Professor at Harvard Medical School and Associate Faculty at Ariadne Labs. She was named a 2021 STAT Wunderkind, and selected as one of MedTech Boston's 40 under 40 and a Aspen Spotlight Health Scholar. She is a graduate of Harvard College, Harvard Medical School, and Harvard Business School. 

October 14, 2022

Class Cancelled: DBMI Fall Retreat

October 7, 2022

Josh Denny, MD, MS, F.A.C.M.I. National Institute of Health, Chief Executive Officer of the All of Us Reserach Program. "All of Us Research Program: A Platform to Transform Biomedical Research."

Bio: Josh Denny is the Chief Executive Officer of the National Institutes of Health’s All of Us Research Program. He has been involved in All of Us from its inception, first as a member of the Advisory Committee to the (NIH) Director Precision Medicine Initiative Working Group, which developed the program’s initial scientific blueprint. He led the program’s initial prototyping project and served as the principal investigator for the All of Us Data and Research Center.  As a physician scientist, Josh is deeply committed to improving patient care through the advancement of precision medicine. Before joining the NIH, Josh was a Professor of Biomedical Informatics and Medicine, Director of the Center for Precision Medicine, and Vice President for Personalized Medicine at Vanderbilt University Medical Center. In his roles at VUMC, he was both a practicing internist and a researcher. His research interests include use of electronic health records (EHRs) and genomics to better understand disease and drug response. He also led efforts implementing precision medicine to improve patient outcomes. Josh was a leader in the development of phenome‐wide association studies (PheWAS) and phenotype risk scores. He served as PI for Vanderbilt sites in the Electronic Medical Records and Genomics (eMERGE) Network, Pharmacogenomics Research Network (PGRN), and the Implementing Genomics into Practice (IGNITE) Network.  He is an elected member of the National Academy of Medicine, the American Society for Clinical Investigation, and the American College of Medical Informatics.

September 30, 2022

Eric Kirkendall, MD, MBI Wake Forrest Health, Deputy Director of NNGN™  (“engine”) - the Wake Forest Center for Healthcare Innovation, Director of Digital Health Innovation, Professor - Pediatric Hospital Medicine. "Innovation and Informatics as a Translational Catalyst: The Wake Forrest Center for Healthcare Innovattion."

Abstract: The word “innovation” means a lot of things to many different people and healthcare innovation centers are becoming increasingly more common in academic centers. While technology and digital health tools play a key role in these centers, the vast majority of the effort that drives success is still rooted in the people and processes involved, particularly in selecting the right problems to address. In this presentation, Dr. Kirkendall will give a brief overview of the Wake Forest Center for Healthcare Innovation, followed by some exemplar projects and their role in a modern academic learning health system.  

Bio: Dr. Eric Kirkendall is a pediatrician that uses health information technology to maximize patient safety and quality in clinical care delivery, data management, and novel application/software development. He is the former Associate Chief Medical Information Officer at Cincinnati Children's Hospital, overseeing the design, implementation, and optimization of the electronic health record and other associated technologies. Eric specializes in applied clinical decision support and digital health innovation and was recruited to help lead the Wake Forest Center for Healthcare Innovation (CHI). In that role he utilizes informatics tools and technologies to accomplish the CHI’s mission of rapidly translating innovation and discoveries into our rapidly growing clinical enterprise, promoting increased care quality, safety, and cost-effectiveness for all.

June 3, 2022

James J. Collins, PhD, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Termeer Professor of Medical Engineering and Science, MIT. "Harnessing synthetic biology and deep learning of fight pathogens."

Bio: The Collins Lab works in synthetic biology and systems biology, with a particular focus on using network biology approaches to study antibiotic action, bacterial defense mechanisms, and the emergence of resistance. They employ engineering principles to model, design and build synthetic gene circuits and programmable cells, in order to create novel classes of diagnostics & therapeutics.  They also use deep learning approaches to discover new genetic parts and enhance the synthetic biology design process. As part of the Antibiotics-AI Project, they are harnessing the power of artificial intelligence (AI) to discover novel classes of antibiotics and rapidly understand how they work. The Collins lab also uses deep learning approaches for the de novo design of new antibiotics and the development of combination treatments. 

May 20, 2022

Lucila Ohno-Machado, MD, PhD, MBA, Professor of Medicine, Chair, UC San Deigo Health Department of Biomedical Informatics, Associate Dean for Inforamtics and Technology. "DBMI's journey: 2009 to 2022 and beyond."

Bio: Lucila Ohno-Machado, MD, MBA, PhD received her medical degree from the University of São Paulo and her doctoral degree in medical information sciences and computer science from Stanford. She is Associate Dean for Informatics and Technology, and the founding chair of the UCSD Health Department of Biomedical Informatics at UCSD, where she leads a group of faculty with diverse backgrounds in medicine, nursing, informatics, and computer science. Also, she is the PI for the California Precision Medicine Consortium for the NIH All of Us Research Program. Prior to her current position, she was faculty at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School and affiliated with the MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology. Dr. Ohno-Machado is an elected member of the American College of Medical Informatics, the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering, the American Society for Clinical Investigation and the National Academy of Medicine. She served as editor-in-chief for the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association from 2011 to 2018. She directs the patient-centered Scalable National Network for Effectiveness Research, a large clinical data research network covering more than 30 million patients and 12 healthcare systems, and was one of the founders of UC-Research eXchange, a clinical data research network that connected the data warehouses of the five University of California medical centers. She was the director of the NIH-funded National Center for Biomedical Computing iDASH (integrating Data for Analysis, ‘anonymization,’ and Sharing) based at UCSD with collaborators in multiple institutions, as well as other NIH-funded consortia and research projects. Her research focuses on privacy-preserving distributed analytics for healthcare and biomedical sciences. She has received numerous awards for innovations in biomedical informatics.

May 13, 2022

Shamim Nemati, PhD., Assistant Professor of Biomedical Informatics and Medicine, Director of the Predictive Health Analytics Program. "Building Predictive Models."

Bio: Dr. Nemati obtained his PhD degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 2013. While at MIT, he was a member of the Laboratory for Computational Physiology(LCP) and the Laboratory for Computational Physiology and Clinical Inference (CPCI) and a research fellow at the Brigham and Women's Hospital and the Harvard Medical School, where he held a National Research Service Award (NRSA). Upon completion of his PhD degree, Dr. Nemati joined the Harvard Intelligent Probabilistic Systems group (HIPS) as a James S. McDonnell Foundation (JSMF) postdoctoral fellow in complex systems. His postdoctoral work was focused on development of deep learning algorithms for pattern discovery in massive longitudinal biomedical datasets. He was a recipient of a Mentored Career Development Award (K01) in biomedical big data science (FOA: HG14-007) through the NIH Big Data to Knowledge (BD2K) initiative (2016-2020).  As the lead PI on a multi-center (BARDA-funded) study, Dr. Nemati was involved in retrospective validation, prospective implementation, and FDA clearance of a sepsis prediction algorithm that was developed as a part of his K01 award. NematiLab's focus on critical care machine learning is supported via multiple awards from the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

April 29, 2022

CT Lin, MD, Chief Medical Information Officer, Professor of Medicine, University of Colorado at Denver. "Sepsis, AI and the Centaur."

Abstract: How did UCHealth move into predictive analytics, machine learning and AI? Why is it so hard to move the needle when applying prediction in healthcare? What does the Centaur have to all of this? Come find out!   

Bio: CT Lin MD is CMIO at UCHealth, an 9-hospital, 400-clinic system in the Rocky Mountain region. In 2016, UCHealth achieved HIMSS Stage 7, indicating highest achievement in EHR effectiveness. In 2017, UCHealth achieved Most Wired status from Hospitals and Health Networks.  He is Professor of Medicine at University of Colorado School of Medicine, and board-certified in Internal Medicine and Clinical Informatics. He sees internal medicine patients and also facilitates workshops on "Physician-patient communication to improve health outcomes" for students, residents and practicing physicians. His national publications and talks include: Physician Adoption of IT, EHR Usability, Online patient communication and patient accessible records with Open Test Results and Open Notes. His national awards include "Healthcare IT innovator" and "Electronic Physician of the Year." He leads a team of 32 physician informaticians, whose main work is now reducing physician burnout and the EHR burden. Our vision: "We improve physician and team resilience and effectiveness by building world-class relationships and innovative tools."

April 22, 2022

Biren Kamdar, MD, MBA, MHS , Associate Professor of Medicine, Div. of Pulmonary, Critical Care, and Sleep Medicine, UC San Diego Health. "Delirium Improvement in 4ICU: Novel use of the EHR to bridge the quality chasm." 

Abstract: Delirium is a condition of varying cognition, sometimes termed “brain failure,” that is a common complication of hospitalization, particularly for patients in the Intensive Care Unit. Delirium causes significant morbidity and mortality, including increased length of stay, healthcare costs, and long-term physical and cognitive deficits. Delirium goes undetected one-third to two-thirds of the time, often because healthcare providers do not know how to detect it. There is no proven treatment for delirium, and the primary goal is prevention. Dr. Kamdar will speak about a comprehensive quality improvement initiative to detect and reduce delirium in the Intensive Care Unit.    

Bio: Biren Kamdar, MD, MBA, MS, MHS, is a board-certified pulmonologist and critical care physician. He cares for adult patients in the Medical Intensive Care Unit (MICU) and those with general lung conditions. As an associate professor in the Department of Medicine, Dr. Kamdar trains medical students, residents and fellows at the UC San Diego School of Medicine. His NIH/NIA-funded research focuses on sleep and circadian rhythms in the ICU; in particular, methods to evaluate sleep in critically ill patients and the effect of interventions to improve sleep-wake cycles on delirium and other important outcomes. Dr. Kamdar has presented on this topic at national and international conferences, and has published in various medical journals and textbooks.

Prior to joining UC San Diego Health, Dr. Kamdar was an assistant professor in the Division of Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. Dr. Kamdar completed a fellowship in pulmonary and critical care medicine at Johns Hopkins Hospital (Johns Hopkins School of Medicine) in Baltimore. During his fellowship, he received an NIH/Kirschstein NRSA Award and a Master in Health Science (MHS) degree from the Graduate Training Program in Clinical Investigation at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. He completed his internal medicine residency at Vanderbilt University Medical Center. He received a joint MD/MBA at the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine and the Vanderbilt Owen Graduate School of Management in Nashville.

April 15, 2022

Jejo Koola, MD., MS, Assistant Professor of Medicine, UCSD Health Department of Biomedical Informatics, University of California San Diego. "Identifying  Early Hepatic Encephalopathy Though Digital Phenotyping."

Abstract:  Hepatic Encephalopathy (HE) leads to frequent hospitalization, costing $2.0 billion annually. Early identification may motivate early treatment; however, diagnosing covert HE requires complex and protracted neuropsychological testing, which is often infeasible in the clinic setting. We conducted a feasibility study using passive sensing technologies as a means of “digitally phenotyping” HE. We recruited adult subjects with cirrhosis and prospectively followed them up to 6 months. We measured cognitive function monthly in a study clinic by a battery of neuropsych testing. We collected interaction data from the subjects’ smartphone utilizing the BiAffect app, which runs in the background and unobtrusively and continuously collects typing speed, typing accuracy, and accelerometer data. Additionally, we fitted subjects with a wrist-worn activity tracker (Fitbit, Inc.) for sleep, activity level, and heart rate measurement. Dr. Koola will present early pilot results on the feasibility of using digital phenotyping to identify hepatic encephalopathy. 

Bio: Dr. Koola is a practicing physician with seven years practicing experience in multiple medical centers. During his fellowship in Biomedical Informatics at the Department of Veterans Affairs in conjunction with a master’s degree from Vanderbilt University he gained formal skills in database management, data mining, information retrieval, software engineering, and natural language processing. He worked with patients who have advanced liver disease (cirrhosis) and constructed risk prediction models using machine learning techniques for mortality, readmission, and phenotyping (case identification). Additionally, he constructed machine learning models to phenotype Hepatorenal Syndrome (a complication of cirrhosis) using Natural Language Processing. He has been working on ways to use observational cohort data to predict decompensation in patients with significant medical comorbidities.

April 8, 2022: No Seminar

April 1, 2022

Jejo Koola, MD., MS, Assistant Professor of Medicine, UCSD Health Department of Biomedical Informatics, University of California San Diego. "Digital Health in Acute Kidney Injury."

Abstract: Digital innovation is rapidly interconnecting the global population. Digital technologies are increasingly becoming essential to daily life. The use of digital innovation and technologies in medicine and related health spheres, referred to as Digital Health, is growing exponentially and is ever more evident in modern healthcare. Digital health applications and solutions have enormous potential to realize improvements and unlock value for individuals, populations and healthcare systems across a wide continuum. In March of 2022, the Acute Disease Quality Initiative (ADQI) held a conference to propose consensus guidelines on Digital Health in Acute Kidney Injury (DH-AKI). The presentation will discuss five key questions addressed at the DH-AKI conference: (a) What is Digital Health? (b) What are the different aspects of Acute Kidney Injury care that may be improved using digital health? (c) What evidence exists for the use of digital health in the care of Acute Kidney Injury? (d) What steps need to be taken from appropriate development, validation, and implementation of Digital Health in AKI; and (e) What are the barriers and facilitators to development, implementation, and dissemination? Finally, we will present a case example of using Digital Health in AKI.

Bio: Dr. Koola is a practicing physician with seven years practicing experience in multiple medical centers. During his fellowship in Biomedical Informatics at the Department of Veterans Affairs in conjunction with a master’s degree from Vanderbilt University he gained formal skills in database management, data mining, information retrieval, software engineering, and natural language processing. He worked with patients who have advanced liver disease (cirrhosis) and constructed risk prediction models using machine learning techniques for mortality, readmission, and phenotyping (case identification). Additionally, he constructed machine learning models to phenotype Hepatorenal Syndrome (a complication of cirrhosis) using Natural Language Processing. He has been working on ways to use observational cohort data to predict decompensation in patients with significant medical comorbidities.

March 11, 2022

March 4, 2022

February 25, 2022

Michael Hogarth, MD, FACMI, FACP, Professor of Clinical Medicine, UC San Diego Health Department of Biomedical Informatics, University of California San Diego "Building Informatics Systems to Support Clinical Research and a Highly Reliable, Learning Healthcare System."

Abstract: Clinical research is critical to the advancement of medical science and public health. Conducting such research is a complex, resource intensive endeavor comprised of a multitude of actors, workflows, processes, and information resources. Ongoing large-scale efforts have explicitly focused on increasing the clinical research capacity of the biomedical sector and have served to increase attention on clinical research and related biomedical informatics activities throughout the governmental, academic, and private sectors. Dr. Hogarth will outline key strategic goals and their following informatics based strategies to facilitate clinical research as well as quality improvement in a healthcare institution. Finally, Dr. Hogarth will provide an update on clinical research informatics systems and services at UCSD.  

Bio: Dr. Michael Hogarth is board certified Internal Medicine physician and a faculty in biomedical informatics. He currently also serves as Chief Clinical Research Information Officer for UC San Diego Health. He is also engaged in a number of grant and contract funded activities. These include the California Electronic Death Registration System (California EDRS), the Maryland Death Registration System, the Athena Breast Health Network project (http://www.athenacarenetwork.org), the novel I-SPY2 adaptive breast cancer clinical trial, the pSCANNER clinical data research network (CDRN), and the California Precision Medicine Consortium (CaPMC). In 2015 he was elected to the American College of Medical Informatics (ACMI).  Dr. Hogarth's research interests include the development of next generation public health information systems, terminology/ontology infrastructure in biomedical informatics, and developing systems that support clinical research at the point of care.

February 18, 2022

Jonathan Lam, PhD Candidate,  Nemati Lab,  UC San Diego Health Department of Biomedical Informatics, University of California San Diego. "Development and Implementation of a Clinical Decision Support Tool in the Era of COVID-19."

Abstract: Multisystem inflammatory syndrome in children (MIS-C) is a novel disease identified during the COVID-19 pandemic characterized by systemic inflammation following SARS-CoV-2 infection. In this talk, we will describe the development of a machine learning model to distinguish MIS-C from similar pediatric inflammatory diseases such as Kawasaki disease. We will then discuss the implementation of the model at Rady Children’s Hospital as well as the FDA regulatory pathways to export the model nationally.

February 4, 2022

Jejo Koola, MD., MS, Assistant Professor of Medicine, UCSD Health Department of Biomedical Informatics, University of California San Diego. "Modeling Learning Effects for Medical Device Safety Surveillance Using Maching Learning."

Abstract: Hands-on experience with implantable medical devices significantly improves clinical outcomes through learning effects. The FDA has stressed the importance of increased post-market surveillance of drugs and medical devices. However, contemporary post-market surveillance strategies for medical devices currently do not separate risk attributable to the device itself versus risk attributable to the operator. Robust medical device safety surveillance that can provide information regarding the etiology of the safety signal requires accurate adjustments for the complex relationships among device characteristics, learning by physicians and institutions, and patient clinical heterogeneity.

Bio: Dr. Koola a practicing hospital medicine physician with ten years practicing experience in multiple medical centers. He focuses on treating multi-morbid patients hospitalized for a variety of conditions including sepsis, organ failure, and chronic kidney, heart, or liver disease. During his fellowship in Biomedical Informatics at the Department of Veterans Affairs in conjunction with a master’s degree from Vanderbilt University, he gained formal skills in database management, data mining, information retrieval, software engineering, and natural language processing. As part of the R2D2 Consortium, he helped develop processes to aggregate and harmonize healthcare data from twelve institutions regarding Coronavirus Disease-2019 using the Observational Medical Outcomes Partnership (OMOP) Common Data Model. He currently isleading multiple studies diagnosing cognitive and frailty complications of chronic illness, particularly cirrhosis, via digital phenotyping. These studies involve gold standard testing within a study clinic environment for cognitive, mood, and frailty followed by passive monitoring in the outpatient setting using smartphone kinematic metadata as well as actigraphy data from a commercial grade actigraph. Additionally, he constructed machine learning models to phenotype Hepatorenal Syndrome (a complication of cirrhosis) using Natural Language Processing. He has been working on ways to use observational cohort data to predict decompensation in patients with significant medical comorbidities.

January 28, 2022

Tsung-Ting (Tim) Kuo, PhD., Assistant Professor, UCSD Health Department of Biomedical Informatics, University of California San Diego. "Decentralized Predictive Modeling and Misconduct Detection."

Abstract: In this talk, Dr. Tsung-Ting Kuo will first introduce decentralized predictive modeling. Then, Dr. Kuo will discuss a real-world risk of such modeling algorithms: incorrect models may be submitted to the learning process, due to either unforeseen accidents or malicious intent, and could therefore reduce the incentives for institutions to participate in the federated modeling consortium. Finally, Dr. Kuo will describe a detection method for such "model misconducts", aiming at solving the problem in an algorithm-agnostic way.

Bio: Dr. Tsung-Ting Kuo is an Assistant Professor of Medicine in University of California San Diego (UCSD) Health Department of Biomedical Informatics (DBMI). He earned his PhD from National Taiwan University (NTU) in the Institute of Networking and Multimedia. Prior to becoming a faculty member, he was a Postdoctoral Scholar at UCSD DBMI and received the UCSD Chancellor’s Outstanding Postdoctoral Scholar Award. He was a major contributor towards the UCSD DBMI team winning the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) healthcare blockchain challenge, and also the NTU team winning the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD) Cup competition four times. He was awarded a NIH K99/R00 Pathway to Independence Award with an Administrative Supplement, as well as UCSD Academic Senate Health Science Research Grants, for blockchain-based biomedical, healthcare and genomic studies. His research focuses on blockchain technologies, machine learning, and natural language processing.

January 21, 2022

Philip R.O. Payne, PhD, FACMI, FAMIA, FAIMBE, FIAHSI, Becker Professor and Director Institute for Informatics (I2), Washington University in St. Louis.  "The Learning Health System: Thinking and Acting Across Scales."

Abstract: A Learning Health System (LHS) can be defined as an environment in which knowledge generation processes are embedded into daily clinical practice in order to continually improve the quality, safety, and outcomes of healthcare delivery. While still largely an aspirational goal, the promise of the LHS is a future in which every patient encounter is an opportunity to learn and improve that patient’s care, as well as the care their family and broader community receives. The foundation for building such an LHS can and should be the Electronic Health Record (EHR), which provides the basis for the comprehensive instrumentation and measurement of clinical phenotypes, as well as a means of delivering new evidence at the patient- and population levels. In this presentation, we will explore the ways in which such EHR-derived phenotypes can be combined with complementary data across a spectrum from biomolecules to population level trends, to both generate insights and deliver such knowledge in the right time, place, and format, ultimately improving clinical outcomes and value.

Bio: Dr. Payne is the Janet and Bernard Becker Professor and founding Director of the Institute for Informatics (I2) at Washington University in St. Louis. He is also the Associate Dean for Health Information and Data Science and Chief Data Scientist for the Washington University School of Medicine, while holding additional appointments as a Professor of Medicine and Computer Science and Engineering. Dr. Payne is an internationally recognized leader in the field of translational bioinformatics (TBI) and clinical research informatics (CRI). He received his PhD with distinction in Biomedical Informatics from Columbia University, where his research focused on the use of knowledge engineering and human-computer interaction design principles in order to improve the efficiency of multi-site clinical and translational research programs. Dr. Payne’s leadership in the informatics community has been recognized through his appointment to numerous national steering, scientific, editorial, and advisory committees, including efforts associated with the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA), AcademyHealth, the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), the National Cancer Institute (NCI), the National Library of Medicine (NLM), and the National Center for Advancing Translational Science (NCATS). Dr. Payne is the author of over 200 publications focusing on the intersection of biomedical informatics and the clinical and translational research domains, including several seminal reports that have served to define a new sub-domain of biomedical informatics theory and practice specifically focusing upon those areas. Dr. Payne’s research group currently focuses on efforts in the fields of biomedical data science, applied clinical informatics, and clinical research informatics, including efforts related to: 1) cognitive computing and machine learning based approaches to computational phenotyping; 2) the design and delivery advanced clinical decision support system that can enable shared decision-making; 3) human factors and workflow issues surrounding the use of technology at the point-of-care; and 4) open-science platforms that enable collaborative approaches to biomedical and healthcare data analytics.

January 14, 2022

Wei Qi-Wei, MD, PhD, FAMIA, Assistant Professor, Department of Biomedical Informatics, School of Medicine, Vanderbilt University.  "Challenges and Current Advances for Phenotyping."

Abstract: Phenotyping based on electronic health record (EHR) data, especially high-throughput phenotyping, is a novel scientific field. It overcomes the challenges inherent in manually developing phenotyping algorithms to classify cases and controls from large-scale datasets. In this talk, Dr. Qi-Wei will describe the significant challenges of using EHR for phenotyping and highlight some work in developing high-throughput phenotyping techniques at Wei's lab (http://phenotyping.org/).

Bio: Dr. Wei is a tenure-track assistant professor of biomedical informatics and computer science (secondary) at Vanderbilt University Medical Center (VUMC), specializing in high throughput phenotyping for large-scale discovery using electronic health records (EHRs). He initially received his medical degree from Peking Union Medical College and Chinese Academy of Medical Science in 2005, a Ph.D. in Health Informatics from the University of Minnesota in 2012 working with Chris Chute, and completed post-doctoral training at Vanderbilt with Joshua Denny in 2014. His research program focuses on creating and leveraging informatics tools, including machine learning, natural language processing, and ontology techniques to harvest knowledge from big clinical/genetic data to advance precision medicine. His work has discovered new genetic relationships between common diseases and common drugs, and generated novel approaches (e.g., PheMAP and DDIWAS) and knowledge bases (e.g., Phecode and MEDI) to enable quality research. Dr. Wei is the PI of multiple R01s and P50s. He participates in several collaborative research networks, including eMERGE, MPRINT, and All of Us. He chairs the eMERGE phenotyping workgroup and serves as the director of Precision Phenotyping Core at VUMC. Dr. Wei is an elected Fellow of the American Medical Informatics Association (FAMIA) in 2019. He has published >100 research papers and invited reviews.

January 7, 2022