Seminar by Dr. Yifan PENG from Department of Population Health Sciences, Weill Cornell Medical College

Medical imaging has been a common examination in daily clinical routines for screening and diagnosis of a variety of diseases. Although hospitals have accumulated a large number of image exams and associated reports, it is yet challenging to use them to build high-precision computer-aided diagnosis systems effectively. In this talk, I will present an overview of cutting-edge techniques for mining existing free-text report data to assist medical image analysis via natural language processing and deep learning. Specifically, I will discuss both pattern-based and machine learning-based methods to detect findings/diseases and their attributes (e.g., type, location, size) from the chest x-ray and CT reports. Using these methods, we can construct large-scale medical image datasets with rich information. I will also demonstrate three case studies of medical image analysis using these datasets: (i) common thorax disease detection and report generation from chest X-rays and (ii) lesion detection and segmentation from CT images.

Dr. Peng is an assistant professor at the Department of Population Health Sciences at Weill Cornell Medicine. His main research interests include BioNLP and medical image analysis. Before joining Cornell Medicine, Dr. Peng was a research fellow at the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), the National Library of Medicine (NLM), National Institutes of Health (NIH). He obtained his Ph.D. degree from the University of Delaware. During his doctoral training, he investigated applications of machine learning in biomedical text-mining, with a focus on deep analysis of the linguistic structures of biomedical texts.