TDAI Core Faculty Member Dr. Ping Zhang has received a National Science Foundation CAREER Award for which he will serve as PI. The project will integrate deep learning algorithms and causal inference techniques to develop actionable methods for observational data (e.g., electronic health records and health insurance claims) with two complementary precision medicine tasks: individual treatment effects (ITEs), which estimate improvement in the outcome of taking a particular action to a particular target; and dynamic treatment regimes (DTRs), which derive a sequence of decision rules, one per stage of intervention, based on evolving treatment and covariate history.

The research team will closely collaborate with medical researchers and physicians for model validation on various real-world clinical problems (e.g., sepsis treatment planning with Emergency Medicine at OSUWMC and pediatric trauma care with Nationwide Children’s Hospital), and will actively seek technology transfer opportunities. The project will provide graduate and undergraduate students with new programs, courses, research, and internship opportunities on machine learning for healthcare applications. The project will also actively include underrepresented students and outreach to high schools and the general public.

Dr. Zhang (http://pingzhang.net/) is an Assistant Professor with joint appointments at BMI and CSE. In addition to being a core faculty member in TDAI (https://tdai.osu.edu/), he leads the Artificial Intelligence in Medicine Lab (http://aimedlab.net/) at OSU.