AI Shows Promise for Mapping Disease Progression

Science Breakthrough

With help from NERSC’s Perlmutter supercomputer, researchers at the Berkeley Lab Applied Mathematics and Computational Research division (AMCR) and a student from the San Juan Bautista School of Medicine (SJBSM) have proposed a framework that allowed them to investigate "embeddings," representations of objects like text that are designed to be consumed by AI models such as large language models (LLMs). They also tested the hypothesis that LLMs might organize data from electronic medical records in a manner that helps characterize patients’ diseases and conditions and how they progress over time. Their work was released on the preprint service medRxiv in July.

Science Background

Electronic medical records can contain useful information on patients’ conditions and the progression of their diseases, but the volume and complexity of the data, as well as issues like missing information and different modalities of data collection, can make it difficult to organize in a way that captures key findings and the nuances of patient health. Through the MVP-CHAMPION partnership between the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), researchers at eight DOE labs are investigating ways in which HPC might be applied to patient data to increase healthcare providers’ diagnostic power and improve patient outcomes. HPC is a critical tool for the work of the MVP-CHAMPION project, since the VA datasets, which include genomics and electronic health records, are vast.

As part of this project, lead LLM engineer Rafael Zamora-Resendiz and Berkeley Lab PI for the MVP-CHAMPION project Silvia Crivelli are developing a pair of LLMs pretrained from scratch on VA biomedical data. They plan to apply their LLMs to a number of projects aimed to improve health outcomes such as obstructive sleep apnea (OSA), lung cancer, and suicide and overdose.

To help organize and interpret the massive, messy dataset, the team has researched natural language processing (NLP) techniques that can help glean key information from “unstructured” data such as doctors’ notes and discharge summaries. These tools have great potential, but understanding how they work and how they translate to meaningful clinical applications is an essential step before they can be applied usefully at scale.

For this paper, Zamora-Resendiz and Crivelli counted on the help of SJBSM student Ifrah Khurram. The team used a publicly available dataset of electronic health records to see how different biomedical LLMs organized patient information. They focused on common patterns the LLMs learned and how they characterized patient disease and stage of disease, in this case, OSA. Specifically, they observed how different LLMs organized hospital admission reports and found that LLMs with more parameters and trained on better-curated data more effectively organized patients by diagnosis. They also noted that these LLMs tended to organize patients by time until death. This organizational scheme may indicate that clinical LLMs may someday offer benefits in detecting the onset and progression of severe diseases.

Science Breakdown

To improve compute performance, one of the researchers’ tasks was to improve data parallelism in preparation for use on Perlmutter’s GPUs, thereby speeding up the LLMs’ ability to break down narratives from clinical text pertaining to 145,915 patients, about 3 GB.

Perlmutter’s GPUs allowed the team to run a bench of open-source biomedical/clinical LLMs, including the University of Florida’s GatorTron, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s BioGPT, and Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility’s Forge, and to develop assessments that can be applied to other biomedical LLMs. In the future, they hope to use Perlmutter to assess larger commercial LLMs that are being fine-tuned for medical problems, like Meta’s Llama-3.

Going forward, the framework developed on Perlmutter will be tested on the models developed for the VA, which cover much longer clinical timelines. Zamora-Resendiz and Crivelli anticipate that the VA models trained from scratch on decades of patient clinical text will be able to learn a higher-resolution map of disease progression and will, as a result, outperform other models when fine-tuned. More importantly, they will contribute to the advancement of precision medicine.

Given the richness of the VA’s longitudinal data (20+ years worth), they expect that running the assessment with VA data would offer stronger evidence that LLMs can organize patients by time until death. However, scaling to the size of the VA data will be a challenge.

Research Lead

Rafael Zamora-Resendiz (Berkeley Lab, AMCR Division)

Co-authors

Ifrah Khurram (San Juan Bautista School of Medicine)

Silvia Crivelli (Berkeley Lab, AMCR Division)

Publication

R. Zamora-Resendiz, I. Khurram, S. Crivelli. “Towards Maps of Disease Progression: Biomedical Large Language Model Latent Spaces For Representing Disease Phenotypes And Pseudotime,” in medRxiv, 2024.

Funding

Funding by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs via Interagency Agreement with DOE. Student Ifrah Khurram was supported by the Berkeley Lab Science Undergraduate Laboratory Internship program (SULI) and the Sustainable Research Pathways program (SRP). 

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