Efficiently comprehending diagnosis and treatment plans remains a significant challenge for both medical professionals and patients, particularly when dealing with rare or newly emerging diseases and specific combinations of comorbidities. We present MedAssist, a large language model (LLM)-empowered medical assistant designed to support the scrutinization and comprehension of electronic health records (EHRs). MedAssist leverages two key components: medical knowledge retrieval, which retrieves the latest and most comprehensive medical knowledge snippets from the web, and data retrieval, which extracts diagnosis and treatment plans for similar patients from existing EHR databases. By integrating these capabilities into user-friendly interfaces, MedAssist bridges critical gaps in medical knowledge accessibility and understanding, and advances patient care in realistic clinical scenarios.
The rapid growth of scientific publications and evolving experimental paradigms create significant challenges in staying up-to-date with current advances. Assertions are often unstructured and have limited provenance, which hinders reproducibility. Ontologies and knowledge graphs (KGs) offer structured solutions by capturing assertions, evidence, and provenance to support reproducibility. This paper reviews 23 ontologies - 13 focused on assertions and evidence and 10 on provenance - providing an overview of the current landscape while highlighting key challenges and opportunities for improvement.
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have achieved great success in learning with graph-structured data. Privacy concerns have also been raised for the trained models which could expose the sensitive information of graphs including both node features and the structure information. In this paper, we aim to achieve node-level differential privacy (DP) for training GNNs so that a node and its edges are protected. Node DP is inherently difficult for GNNs because all direct and multi-hop neighbors participate in the calculation of gradients for each node via layer-wise message passing and there is no bound on how many direct and multi-hop neighbors a node can have, so existing DP methods will result in high privacy cost or poor utility due to high node sensitivity. We propose a D ecoupled GNN with Differentially P rivate A pproximate Personalized PageR ank (DPAR) for training GNNs with an enhanced privacy-utility tradeoff. The key idea is to decouple the feature projection and message passing via a DP PageRank algorithm which learns the structure information and uses the top-K neighbors determined by the PageRank for feature aggregation. By capturing the most important neighbors for each node and avoiding the layer-wise message passing, it bounds the node sensitivity and achieves improved privacy-utility tradeoff compared to layer-wise perturbation based methods. We theoretically analyze the node DP guarantee for the two processes combined together and empirically demonstrate better utilities of DPAR with the same level of node DP compared with state-of-the-art methods.
Patient risk prediction models are crucial as they enable healthcare providers to proactively identify and address potential health risks. Large pre-trained foundation models offer remarkable performance in risk prediction tasks by analyzing multimodal patient data. However, a notable limitation of pre-trained foundation models lies in their deterministic predictions (i.e., lacking the ability to acknowledge uncertainty). We propose Gaussian Process-based foundation models to enable the generation of accurate predictions with instance-level uncertainty quantification, thus allowing healthcare professionals to make more informed and cautious decisions. Our proposed approach is principled and architecture-agnostic. Experimental results show that our proposed approach achieves competitive performance on classical classification metrics. Moreover, we observe that the accuracy of certain predictions is much higher than that of the uncertain ones, which validates the uncertainty awareness of our proposed method. Therefore, healthcare providers can trust low-uncertainty predictions and conduct more comprehensive investigations on high-uncertainty predictions, ultimately enhancing patient outcomes with less expert intervention.
Model card reports provide a transparent description of machine learning models which includes information about their evaluation, limitations, intended use, etc. Federal health agencies have expressed an interest in model cards report for research studies using machine-learning based AI. Previously, we have developed an ontology model for model card reports to structure and formalize these reports. In this paper, we demonstrate a Java-based library (OWL API, FaCT++) that leverages our ontology to publish computable model card reports. We discuss future directions and other use cases that highlight applicability and feasibility of ontology-driven systems to support FAIR challenges.
