Professor Rui Zhang at ECE Fall 2024 Colloquium

Artificial intelligence for advancing cancer, nutrition and aging research

In this seminar, Professor Rui Zhang will provide an overview of his ongoing research projects aimed at advancing clinical research across various domains developing innovative artificial intelligence (AI) methods. Focusing on the cancer domain, Zhang will introduce cancer-domain language models developed to extract cancer phenotypes. This advancement holds significant implications for predicting cardiotoxicity related to cancer treatment. Shifting to the nutrition domain, the seminar will delve into Zhang's foundational work in establishing a knowledge base for dietary supplements. Additionally, he will showcase AI methodologies employed to extract efficacy and safety information from diverse sources, contributing to a comprehensive understanding of dietary supplement safety. In the aging domain, Zhang will discuss the applications of AI to repurpose Complementary and Integrative Health (CIH) approaches for Alzheimer's disease. The seminar will also highlight their recent work advancing large language models on multiple informatics tasks. In addition, Zhang will briefly introduce the Division of Computational Health Sciences in the Medical School and potential collaboration opportunities.

About Professor Zhang

Rui Zhang is Professor and Founding Chief of Division of Computational Health Sciences in the Department of Surgery at the University of Minnesota. He is a McKnight Presidential Fellow and currently the Director of Natural Language Processing/Information Extraction (NLP/IE) research program in the Institute for Health Informatics. Zhang is also co-Chair of AI and Data science for Healthcare (AID-H) working group within the UMN’s Data Science Initiative, and Scientific co-Director of Innovative Methods & Data Science (IMDS) program at the Center for Learning Health System Sciences. Zhang’s research is at the forefront of integrating novel artificial intelligence (AI) with healthcare, focusing on analyze multi-modal biomedical big data, including electronic health records, biomedical literature, patient-generated data, and biomedical knowledge bases. His research has been fully supported by multiple National Institutes of Health (NIH) grants with a total cost $20 million as a Principal Investigator, focusing on transformative AI projects such as mining safety use of dietary supplements (two NCCIH R01s), discovering drug repurposing of Alzheimer’s disease (NIA R01), predicting breast cancer treatment related cardiotoxicity (NCI R01), identifying medical language bias in kidney transplantation (NIDDK R01), minority-enriched risk predictive models on All of Us data (NIHMD R21) and LLM to develop knowledge on complementary and integrative health (NCCIH U01).

Zhang’s research has paved the way for groundbreaking advancement in personalized medicine in multiple clinical domains to better patient care. His work has been recognized on a national scale including Journal of Biomedical Informatics Editor’s Choice, nominated for Distinguished paper in American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA) Annual Symposium and Marco Ramoni Distinguished Paper Award for Translational Bioinformatics, reported by The Wall Street Journal, and interviewed by CBS News. Zhang is the Fellow of AMIA and the Chair of AMIA Natural Language Processing (NLP) Working Group, and recently inducted to the Fellow of American College of Medical Informatics (FACMI) in recognition of his significant and sustained contributions to the field of biomedical informatics.

Professor Rui Zhang at ECE Fall 2024 Colloquium

Artificial intelligence for advancing cancer, nutrition and aging research

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