Dr. Alemi and Dr. Lybarger have received a prestigious $1,049,998 award from the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI) for their 3-year project titled Evaluating Conversational Artificial Intelligence for Depression Management. This initiative seeks to explore innovative applications of large language models to enhance antidepressant recommendations and improve patient outcomes. More details are available on the PCORI website and GMU website.

George Mason University’s College of Public Health received a $70,906 NIH AIM-AHEAD grant to develop and test an AI chatbot designed to recommend antidepressants specifically for African Americans with depression, aiming to address gaps in personalized treatment and improve mental health outcomes within this community. Details available at https://www.gmu.edu/news/2024-06/college-public-health-receives-nih-grant-pilot-ai-chatbot-african-americans-depression.

Our paper describing the National NLP Clinical Challenges (n2c2) extraction task, Track 2: Extracting Social Determinants of Health, was just published in JAMIA: https://doi.org/10.1093/jamia/ocad012. Challenge participants used a wide range of innovative techniques. Check out the paper to learn more.

The Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association (JAMIA) will be publishing a focus issue titled, “Social Determinants of Health (SDOH) Extraction through Natural Language Processing.” Submissions are due in early December. Details are available at https://academic.oup.com/jamia/pages/cfp-social-determinants.

We are holding a clinical information extraction challenge through the National NLP Clinical Challenges using the Social History Annotated Corpus from our prior work. To learn more and register to participate, check out the challenge website.

Our AMIA work exploring digital scribes and transcribed patient visits was recently featured in an article by Fierce Healthcare.

I am giving a talk regarding my social determinants of health (SDOH) research to the UW Center for Studies in Demography & Ecology on November 5, 2021 at 12:30 PM. The talk will be held via zoom, and full details are available at the following link.

On October 26, 2021, I will be presenting at the AMIA Virtual Day. I will present a paper exploring the automatic identification of acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) in chest radiograph reports at session VD12 from 1:30 PM-3:00 PM PT (paper & slides). I will also present a poster exploring the application of information extraction models to transcribed patient visits at session VD13 from 3:15 PM-4:30 PM PT (abstract & poster).

My doctoral dissertation was recently recognized as a 2021 AMIA Doctoral Dissertation Award Finalist for its contributions to biomedical informatics. My dissertation is available online.