“Excellence Unveiled at UNC with Chancellor Lee Roberts” is a series on 97.9 The Hill and Chapelboro.com sponsored by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Each episode shines a light on members of the Carolina community and the outstanding work they do. Listen to the full episode below, or read the complete transcript.
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In the eighth installment of Excellence Unveiled, listen to Michael Kosorok, distinguished professor of biostatistics at UNC, for a conversation about how AI can be used to advance health research and help solve public health challenges. The UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health has launched the Center for Artificial Intelligence and Public Health (CAIPH), a new initiative focused on the future of artificial intelligence (AI) at the Gillings School.
One thing that I think is unique overall about UNC is the collaborative culture. And the thing that completely blew me away was how much people like to work together in different disciplines. We have very, very deep expertise here. Artificial intelligence is such a big area that everybody thinks of all sorts of things when you hear the word. Our focus is on something called generative AI, large language models and neural nets — as well as reinforcement learning. This just means that we don’t do just the sort of standard machine learning-type analysis. We’re really focusing on some of the edgier types of AI tools. Our mission is to help our university become leaders and cutting edge artificial intelligence to improve human health. We are working on both the applications of these, we want to develop tools that can be used to improve health. We also want to develop methods so that we can be on the cutting edge.
There are actually several exciting projects. I can tell you one that is completed, mostly, and this is one that involves work with Jeffrey Stringer and his group. And the goal of this was to develop a tool that can be used in very under-resourced locations to accurately predict gestational age without the usual resources. Normally, when women are pregnant and looking forward to having a child, there’s a physician, there’s an ultrasound technician and ultrasound equipment that’s used to see how the baby’s doing. To assess gestational age in under-resourced locations, you may have none of those things available. And so we had to develop something that can be used in these locations successfully. My lab, and especially a student of mine at the time, Ben Pokaprakarn, help contribute to the AI development itself. The tool, our first publication showed that this was very, very accurate, in fact, more accurate than an expert.
One other example is in the area of lower back pain. This is a collaboration with 13 institutions around the country. UNC Chapel Hill is the coordinating location. I help with the reinforcement in the design of the study and a student of mine did to the majority of the work. And in this study, we’re looking at how can we help physicians know when and how to treat patients with lower back pain. This is a chronic problem, that people feel. It’s one of the main causes of the opioid epidemic because it’s so chronically painful. We develop a special type of trial design and our goal is to be able to use reinforcement learning, which is a type of AI, to link the different biomarkers that a patient has, different measurements where they’re at in their health, to be able to, to make sure that the first treatment is the best possible and that the next treatment is the best adaptation based on how the first treatment went. Over 900 patients were entered into the study, and so that analysis we hope to complete this year.
Michael R. Kosorok, PhD (image via UNC)
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