Alexander Lopez

Ha Na Cho, Sairam Sutari, Alexander Lopez et al.

Timely discharge prediction is essential for optimizing bed turnover and resource allocation in elective spine surgery units. This study evaluates the feasibility of lightweight, fine-tuned large language models (LLMs) and traditional text-based models for predicting next-day discharge using postoperative clinical notes. We compared 13 models, including TF-IDF with XGBoost and LGBM, and compact LLMs (DistilGPT-2, Bio_ClinicalBERT) fine-tuned via LoRA. TF-IDF with LGBM achieved the best balance, with an F1-score of 0.47 for the discharge class, a recall of 0.51, and the highest AUC-ROC (0.80). While LoRA improved recall in DistilGPT2, overall transformer-based and generative models underperformed. These findings suggest interpretable, resource-efficient models may outperform compact LLMs in real-world, imbalanced clinical prediction tasks.

Stanley Chinedu Okoro, Alexander Lopez, Austine Unuriode

Over the past few years, wildfires have become a worldwide environmental emergency, resulting in substantial harm to natural habitats and playing a part in the acceleration of climate change. Wildfire management methods involve prevention, response, and recovery efforts. Despite improvements in detection techniques, the rising occurrence of wildfires demands creative solutions for prompt identification and effective control. This research investigates proactive methods for detecting and handling wildfires in the United States, utilizing Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML), and 5G technology. The specific objective of this research covers proactive detection and prevention of wildfires using advanced technology; Active monitoring and mapping with remote sensing and signaling leveraging on 5G technology; and Advanced response mechanisms to wildfire using drones and IOT devices. This study was based on secondary data collected from government databases and analyzed using descriptive statistics. In addition, past publications were reviewed through content analysis, and narrative synthesis was used to present the observations from various studies. The results showed that developing new technology presents an opportunity to detect and manage wildfires proactively. Utilizing advanced technology could save lives and prevent significant economic losses caused by wildfires. Various methods, such as AI-enabled remote sensing and 5G-based active monitoring, can enhance proactive wildfire detection and management. In addition, super intelligent drones and IOT devices can be used for safer responses to wildfires. This forms the core of the recommendation to the fire Management Agencies and the government.

Ha Na Cho, Sairam Sutari, Alexander Lopez et al.

Objective: To develop and evaluate machine learning (ML) models for predicting length of stay (LOS) in elective spine surgery, with a focus on the benefits of temporal modeling and model interpretability. Materials and Methods: We compared traditional ML models (e.g., linear regression, random forest, support vector machine (SVM), and XGBoost) with our developed model, SurgeryLSTM, a masked bidirectional long short-term memory (BiLSTM) with an attention, using structured perioperative electronic health records (EHR) data. Performance was evaluated using the coefficient of determination (R2), and key predictors were identified using explainable AI. Results: SurgeryLSTM achieved the highest predictive accuracy (R2=0.86), outperforming XGBoost (R2 = 0.85) and baseline models. The attention mechanism improved interpretability by dynamically identifying influential temporal segments within preoperative clinical sequences, allowing clinicians to trace which events or features most contributed to each LOS prediction. Key predictors of LOS included bone disorder, chronic kidney disease, and lumbar fusion identified as the most impactful predictors of LOS. Discussion: Temporal modeling with attention mechanisms significantly improves LOS prediction by capturing the sequential nature of patient data. Unlike static models, SurgeryLSTM provides both higher accuracy and greater interpretability, which are critical for clinical adoption. These results highlight the potential of integrating attention-based temporal models into hospital planning workflows. Conclusion: SurgeryLSTM presents an effective and interpretable AI solution for LOS prediction in elective spine surgery. Our findings support the integration of temporal, explainable ML approaches into clinical decision support systems to enhance discharge readiness and individualized patient care.