Chronic Leukemia and Machine Learning

Researchers are trying to improve the future design of cancer treatment by assessing health-related quality of life traits in leukemia patient data.

Yanjun Qi, associate professor, computer science

Yanjun Qi is an associate professor in the Department of Computer Science. Her research focuses on using machine learning techniques to make meaningful biomedical discoveries that impact patient health. She is applying her expertise at the UVA Cancer Center Genome-Phenotype Association Lab, where she will help implement their plan to  improve design treatment trials for leukemia patients. Since most of the UVA historical leukemia patient data is saved in PDF files and scanned in the electronic health record, extracting the data for patient insights is difficult. Professor Qi is helping to develop a natural language processing system to automatically extract quality of life features from these scanned clinical notes. By combining the correlated patient history data and looking for patterns, the center may be able to answer many of the clinically important questions related to both predictive markers of disease and potential treatment  interventions.