New Methods for Disease Prediction using Imaging and Genomics

Eran Halperin (UnitedHealth Group)

Diagnosis and prediction of health outcomes using machine learning has shown major advances over the last few years. Some of the major challenges remaining in the field include the sparsity of electronic health records data, and the scarcity of high-quality labeled data. In this talk, I will present a couple of examples where we partially address these challenges. Specifically, I will provide an overview of a new neural network architecture for the analysis of three-dimensional medical imaging data (optical coherence tomography) under scarce labeled data and demonstrate applications in age-related macular degeneration. Then, I will describe in more detail a new Bayesian framework for the imputation of electronic health records (addressing sparsity) using DNA methylation data. Our framework involves a tensor deconvolution of bulk DNA methylation to obtain cell-type-specific methylation from bulk data, which we demonstrate is predictive of many clinical outcomes.  

Dr. Eran Halperin is the SVP of AI and Machine Learning in Optum Labs (United Health Group), and a professor in the departments of Computer Science, Computational Medicine, Anesthesiology, and Human Genetics at UCLA. Prior to his current position, he held research and postdoctoral positions at the University of California, Berkeley, the International Computer Science Institute in Berkeley, Princeton University, and Tel-Aviv University. Dr. Halperin’s lab developed computational and machine learning methods for a variety of health-related applications, including different genomic applications (genetics, methylation, microbiome, single-cell RNA), and medical applications (medical imaging, physiological waveforms, and electronic medical records). He published more than 150 peer-reviewed publications, and he received various honors for academic achievements, including the Rothschild Fellowship, the Technion-Juludan prize for technological contribution to medicine, the Krill prize, and he was elected as an International Society of Computational Biology (ISCB) fellow.