Sentiment-guided Commonsense-aware Response Generation for Mental Health Counseling

The crisis of mental health issues is escalating. Effective counseling serves as a critical lifeline for individuals suffering from conditions like PTSD, stress, etc. Therapists forge a crucial therapeutic bond with clients, steering them towards positivity. Unfortunately, the massive shortage of professionals, high costs, and mental health stigma pose significant barriers to consulting therapists. As a substitute, Virtual Mental Health Assistants (VMHAs) have emerged in the digital healthcare space. However, most existing VMHAs lack the commonsense to understand the nuanced sentiments of clients to generate effective responses. To this end, we propose EmpRes, a novel sentiment-guided mechanism incorporating commonsense awareness for generating responses. By leveraging foundation models and harnessing commonsense knowledge, EmpRes aims to generate responses that effectively shape the client's sentiment towards positivity. We evaluate the performance of EmpRes on HOPE, a benchmark counseling dataset, and observe a remarkable performance improvement compared to the existing baselines across a suite of qualitative and quantitative metrics. Moreover, our extensive empirical analysis and human evaluation show that the generation ability of EmpRes is well-suited and, in some cases, surpasses the gold standard. Further, we deploy EmpRes as a chat interface for users seeking mental health support. We address the deployed system's effectiveness through an exhaustive user study with a significant positive response. Our findings show that 91% of users find the system effective, 80% express satisfaction, and over 85.45% convey a willingness to continue using the interface and recommend it to others, demonstrating the practical applicability of EmpRes in addressing the pressing challenges of mental health support, emphasizing user feedback, and ethical considerations in a real-world context.

No perspective, no perception!! Perspective-aware Healthcare Answer Summarization

Healthcare Community Question Answering (CQA) forums offer an accessible platform for individuals seeking information on various healthcare-related topics. People find such platforms suitable for self-disclosure, seeking medical opinions, finding simplified explanations for their medical conditions, and answering others' questions. However, answers on these forums are typically diverse and prone to off-topic discussions. It can be challenging for readers to sift through numerous answers and extract meaningful insights, making answer summarization a crucial task for CQA forums. While several efforts have been made to summarize the community answers, most of them are limited to the open domain and overlook the different perspectives offered by these answers. To address this problem, this paper proposes a novel task of perspective-specific answer summarization. We identify various perspectives, within healthcare-related responses and frame a perspective-driven abstractive summary covering all responses. To achieve this, we annotate 3167 CQA threads with 6193 perspective-aware summaries in our PUMA dataset. Further, we propose PLASMA, a prompt-driven controllable summarization model. To encapsulate the perspective-specific conditions, we design an energy-controlled loss function for the optimization. We also leverage the prefix tuner to learn the intricacies of the health-care perspective summarization. Our evaluation against five baselines suggests the superior performance of PLASMA by a margin of 1.5-21% improvement. We supplement our experiments with ablation and qualitative analysis.

Eye Disease Prediction using Ensemble Learning and Attention on OCT Scans

Eye diseases have posed significant challenges for decades, but advancements in technology have opened new avenues for their detection and treatment. Machine learning and deep learning algorithms have become instrumental in this domain, particularly when combined with Optical Coherent Technology (OCT) imaging. We propose a novel method for efficient detection of eye diseases from OCT images. Our technique enables the classification of patients into disease free (normal eyes) or affected by specific conditions such as Choroidal Neovascularization (CNV), Diabetic Macular Edema (DME), or Drusen. In this work, we introduce an end to end web application that utilizes machine learning and deep learning techniques for efficient eye disease prediction. The application allows patients to submit their raw OCT scanned images, which undergo segmentation using a trained custom UNet model. The segmented images are then fed into an ensemble model, comprising InceptionV3 and Xception networks, enhanced with a self attention layer. This self attention approach leverages the feature maps of individual models to achieve improved classification accuracy. The ensemble model's output is aggregated to predict and classify various eye diseases. Extensive experimentation and optimization have been conducted to ensure the application's efficiency and optimal performance. Our results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach in accurate eye disease prediction. The developed web application holds significant potential for early detection and timely intervention, thereby contributing to improved eye healthcare outcomes.