Speaker: Gregory F. Cooper, M.D., Ph.D.
Title: Detection and Characterization of Novel Outbreak Diseases
Abstract: The early identification of outbreaks of both known and novel diseases is an important issue in public health. We have developed and investigated several methods that seek to detect and characterize a novel outbreak disease in the context of ongoing outbreaks of known diseases. Our primary focus has been on detecting and characterizing influenza-like illnesses using electronic medical record data obtained from emergency departments. This talk provides a summary of the methods we have explored and the results we have obtained in applying them.
Bio: Gregory F. Cooper, MD, PhD, is Professor of Biomedical Informatics in the School of Medicine at the University of Pittsburgh. He also holds a faculty appointment in Intelligent Systems. His research involves the use of causal modeling, Bayesian statistics, machine learning, and artificial intelligence to develop and evaluate new methods that seek to improve healthcare and advance biomedical discovery. He is currently involved in projects on infectious disease outbreak detection and characterization, personalized cancer diagnosis and outcome prediction, clinical alerting based on machine learning from an electronic-medical-record (EMR) system, and optimization of individual treatment selection based on causal inference that combines EMR and RCT data.