Causal Discovery on Dependent Binary Data

The assumption of independence between observations (units) in a dataset is prevalent across various methodologies for learning causal graphical models. However, this assumption often finds itself in conflict with real-world data, posing challenges to accurate structure learning. We propose a decorrelation-based approach for causal graph learning on dependent binary data, where the local conditional distribution is defined by a latent utility model with dependent errors across units. We develop a pairwise maximum likelihood method to estimate the covariance matrix for the dependence among the units. Then, leveraging the estimated covariance matrix, we develop an EM-like iterative algorithm to generate and decorrelate samples of the latent utility variables, which serve as decorrelated data. Any standard causal discovery method can be applied on the decorrelated data to learn the underlying causal graph. We demonstrate that the proposed decorrelation approach significantly improves the accuracy in causal graph learning, through numerical experiments on both synthetic and real-world datasets.

Location-based Radiology Report-Guided Semi-supervised Learning for Prostate Cancer Detection

Prostate cancer is one of the most prevalent malignancies in the world. While deep learning has potential to further improve computer-aided prostate cancer detection on MRI, its efficacy hinges on the exhaustive curation of manually annotated images. We propose a novel methodology of semisupervised learning (SSL) guided by automatically extracted clinical information, specifically the lesion locations in radiology reports, allowing for use of unannotated images to reduce the annotation burden. By leveraging lesion locations, we refined pseudo labels, which were then used to train our location-based SSL model. We show that our SSL method can improve prostate lesion detection by utilizing unannotated images, with more substantial impacts being observed when larger proportions of unannotated images are used.

Multimodal Clinical Pseudo-notes for Emergency Department Prediction Tasks using Multiple Embedding Model for EHR (MEME)

In this work, we introduce Multiple Embedding Model for EHR (MEME), an approach that views Electronic Health Records (EHR) as multimodal data. This approach incorporates "pseudo-notes", textual representations of tabular EHR concepts such as diagnoses and medications, and allows us to effectively employ Large Language Models (LLMs) for EHR representation. This framework also adopts a multimodal approach, embedding each EHR modality separately. We demonstrate the effectiveness of MEME by applying it to several tasks within the Emergency Department across multiple hospital systems. Our findings show that MEME surpasses the performance of both single modality embedding methods and traditional machine learning approaches. However, we also observe notable limitations in generalizability across hospital institutions for all tested models.