Towards Holistic Disease Risk Prediction using Small Language Models

Data in the healthcare domain arise from a variety of sources and modalities, such as x-ray images, continuous measurements, and clinical notes. Medical practitioners integrate these diverse data types daily to make informed and accurate decisions. With recent advancements in language models capable of handling multimodal data, it is a logical progression to apply these models to the healthcare sector. In this work, we introduce a framework that connects small language models to multiple data sources, aiming to predict the risk of various diseases simultaneously. Our experiments encompass 12 different tasks within a multitask learning setup. Although our approach does not surpass state-of-the-art methods specialized for single tasks, it demonstrates competitive performance and underscores the potential of small language models for multimodal reasoning in healthcare.

Creating and Benchmarking a Synthetic Dataset for Cloud Optical Thickness Estimation

Cloud formations often obscure optical satellite-based monitoring of the Earth's surface, thus limiting Earth observation (EO) activities such as land cover mapping, ocean color analysis, and cropland monitoring. The integration of machine learning (ML) methods within the remote sensing domain has significantly improved performance on a wide range of EO tasks, including cloud detection and filtering, but there is still much room for improvement. A key bottleneck is that ML methods typically depend on large amounts of annotated data for training, which is often difficult to come by in EO contexts. This is especially true for the task of cloud optical thickness (COT) estimation. A reliable estimation of COT enables more fine-grained and application-dependent control compared to using pre-specified cloud categories, as is commonly done in practice. To alleviate the COT data scarcity problem, in this work we propose a novel synthetic dataset for COT estimation, where top-of-atmosphere radiances have been simulated for 12 of the spectral bands of the Multi-Spectral Instrument (MSI) sensor onboard Sentinel-2 platforms. These data points have been simulated under consideration of different cloud types, COTs, and ground surface and atmospheric profiles. Extensive experimentation of training several ML models to predict COT from the measured reflectivity of the spectral bands demonstrates the usefulness of our proposed dataset. Generalization to real data is also demonstrated on two satellite image datasets -- one that is publicly available, and one which we have collected and annotated. The synthetic data, the newly collected real dataset, code and models have been made publicly available at https://github.com/aleksispi/ml-cloud-opt-thick.