Heather Richter

Jonathan Colen, Eric Werner, Maryam Golbazi et al.

Childhood asthma is a common illness exacerbated by air pollution as well as meteorological and neighborhood-level socioeconomic factors. Modeling asthma exacerbation (AE) in large spatiotemporal datasets requires disentangling impacts from multiple contributors. In this case study, we compared three techniques that balance predictive power with interpretability to predict AE in Hampton Roads, a coastal Virginia region comprising 7 cities and over 1.5 million people. After collating ambient air pollution measurements, weather data, and measures of neighborhood opportunity, we modeled zip code-level acute AE visits to a regional children's hospital and affiliated providers from 2018-2023. Generalized linear models (GLM) provided a baseline while neural networks (NN) served as a maximally predictive target. To bridge between statistical models and deep learning, we developed a framework based on sparse dictionary learning to identify and interpret parsimonious nonlinear interacting equations. After comparing each model's predictive performance, we estimated relative risks for AE due to input exposure variables and found consensus across frameworks. Our work links statistical and interpretable machine learning models to highlight possible synergistic interactions influencing AE, and may enable future studies to guide public health interventions in coastal Virginia.

Diana McSpadden, Steven Goldenberg, Binata Roy et al.

Low-lying coastal cities, exemplified by Norfolk, Virginia, face the challenge of street flooding caused by rainfall and tides, which strain transportation and sewer systems and can lead to property damage. While high-fidelity, physics-based simulations provide accurate predictions of urban pluvial flooding, their computational complexity renders them unsuitable for real-time applications. Using data from Norfolk rainfall events between 2016 and 2018, this study compares the performance of a previous surrogate model based on a random forest algorithm with two deep learning models: Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) and Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU). This investigation underscores the importance of using a model architecture that supports the communication of prediction uncertainty and the effective integration of relevant, multi-modal features.

Ross Gore, Eranga Bandara, Sachin Shetty et al.

Mild Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) detection presents significant challenges due to the subtle and often ambiguous presentation of symptoms in medical imaging, making accurate diagnosis a complex task. To address these challenges, we propose Proof-of-TBI, a medical diagnosis support system that integrates multiple fine-tuned vision-language models with the OpenAI-o3 reasoning large language model (LLM). Our approach fine-tunes multiple vision-language models using a labeled dataset of TBI MRI scans, training them to diagnose TBI symptoms effectively. The predictions from these models are aggregated through a consensus-based decision-making process. The system evaluates the predictions from all fine-tuned vision language models using the OpenAI-o3 reasoning LLM, a model that has demonstrated remarkable reasoning performance, to produce the most accurate final diagnosis. The LLM Agents orchestrates interactions between the vision-language models and the reasoning LLM, managing the final decision-making process with transparency, reliability, and automation. This end-to-end decision-making workflow combines the vision-language model consortium with the OpenAI-o3 reasoning LLM, enabled by custom prompt engineering by the LLM agents. The prototype for the proposed platform was developed in collaboration with the U.S. Army Medical Research team in Newport News, Virginia, incorporating five fine-tuned vision-language models. The results demonstrate the transformative potential of combining fine-tuned vision-language model inputs with the OpenAI-o3 reasoning LLM to create a robust, secure, and highly accurate diagnostic system for mild TBI prediction. To the best of our knowledge, this research represents the first application of fine-tuned vision-language models integrated with a reasoning LLM for TBI prediction tasks.