Date: Friday, June 27, 2025
Time: 11:00 AM – 12:00 PM
Venue: A-420, R&D Block
Speaker: Dr. Ramakanth Kavuluru, Professor of Biomedical Informatics at the University of Kentucky, USA
Talk Title: Role of EMRs and Textual Data in Precision Medicine
Organized by: Department of CSE & Center for Artificial Intelligence
Precision medicine” typically evokes the use of specific genetic traits of an individual to tailor care that fits them — a popular approach that has been doing wonders for cancer patients around the world, including my uncle here in India. But what about other traits such as environment, lifestyle, and other social determinants of health? How do we collect, represent, store, and retrieve the critical information needed to conduct research, clinical trials, and operationalize the vision and promise of precision medicine? In this talk, I discuss why and how electronic medical records (including clinical notes) currently offer the main source where all these traits are coarsely aggregated. I will highlight the role of natural language processing methods (think ChatGPT) in extracting information from textual data (clinical notes, scientific literature) central to the precision medicine agenda.
Dr. Ramakanth Kavuluru is a professor of biomedical informatics (Department of Internal Medicine) in the College of Medicine at the University of Kentucky (UKY). He graduated with a PhD in computer science in 2009 from UKY with a focus on the security properties of pseudorandom sequences. Subsequently, he worked in knowledge-based search systems for biomedicine as a postdoctoral scholar at Wright State University. Since 2011, he has been working as a faculty member at UKY focusing on natural language processing methods and their use in biomedical research and healthcare delivery. He is currently at the tail end of his sabbatical in India funded by a Fulbright-Nehru research award.