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Qingyu Chen, PhD

Assistant Professor of Biomedical Informatics and Data Science
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Assistant Professor of Biomedical Informatics and Data Science

Biography

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Dr. Qingyu Chen is a tenure-track Assistant Professor at the Department of Biomedical Informatics & Data Science, School of Medicine, starting in 2024. Prior to this, he completed the postdoctoral training at the National Center for Biotechnology Information, National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health. Dr. Chen holds a PhD in Computer Science (Biomedical Informatics) from the University of Melbourne.

His research focuses on data science and artificial intelligence (AI) in biomedicine and healthcare. Dr. Chen has led significant milestones from data generation to method development and practical applications. His research interests can be broadly categorized into three areas:

  • Biomedical Natural Language Processing and Large Language Models

  • Medical Image and Multimodal Analysis in Healthcare

  • Downstream Accountability and Trustworthy AI for Medical Applications

Dr. Chen is the Principal Investigator of the R01 grant on improving factuality of LLMs in medicine (see news) and K99/R00 grant on multimodal AI-assisted disease diagnosis (see news). He has published over 40 first/last-author papers out of a total of 80+ publications within these research areas. His work has been in venues such as Nature, Nature Medicine, Nature Machine Intelligence, Nature Aging, NPJ Digital Medicine, Nucleic Acids Research, among others.

Dr. Chen has also taught over 20 courses and mentored more than 10 trainees. His teaching and mentoring have been recognized with the NIH Summer Research Mentor Award (four times) and Excellence in Teaching Awards (twice).

For more information, please visit https://sites.google.com/view/qingyuchen/home.


Appointments

Education & Training

PhD
University of Melbourne, Computer Science and Biomedical Informatics (Microsoft Innovation Award; Excellence in Teaching Award; Top-ranked performance in AI challenge tasks
BS (Hon)
The Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, Computer Science (GPA ranked 1st; First-class Honor; Academic Excellence Award) (2013)

Research

Overview

Dr. Chen's research focuses on data science and artificial intelligence (AI) in biomedicine and healthcare. He has led significant milestones from data generation to method development and practical applications. His research interests can be broadly categorized into three areas:

  • Biomedical Natural Language Processing and Large Language Models
  • Medical Image and Multimodal Analysis in Healthcare
  • Downstream Accountability and Trustworthy AI for Medical Applications

Dr. Chen is the Principal Investigator of the K99/R00 grant on multimodal AI-assisted disease diagnosis. He has authored over 40 first/last-author papers out of a total of 80+ publications within these research areas. My work has been featured in venues such as Nature, Nature Medicine, Nature Machine Intelligence, Nature Aging, NPJ Digital Medicine, Nucleic Acids Research, among others.

His research has been recognized with several awards, including the NIH Fellows Award for Research Excellence (twice), AI Talent Scholar (Top 50 in AI across disciplines, selected by Baidu Scholar), NLM Honor Award (twice), and top-ranked performances in biomedical and clinical NLP challenges (four times, three as first author).

He has also taught over 20 courses and mentored more than 10 trainees. My teaching and mentoring have been recognized with the NIH Summer Research Mentor Award (four times) and Excellence in Teaching Awards (twice).

Selected recent work

  1. Outpatient Reception via Collaboration Between Nurses and a Large Language Model: A Randomized Controlled Trial. Nature Medicine, 2024.
  2. GeneGPT: Augmenting Large Language Models with Domain Tools for Improved Access to Biomedical Information. Bioinformatics, 2024.
  3. Advancing Entity Recognition in Biomedicine via Instruction Tuning of Large Language Models. Bioinformatics, 2024.
  4. Improving Large Language Models for Clinical Named Entity Recognition via Prompt Engineering. Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, 2024.
  5. Large Language Models in Biomedical Natural Language Processing: Benchmarks, Baselines, and Recommendations. 2023.
  6. LitCovid in 2022: An Information Resource for the COVID-19 Literature. Nucleic Acids Research, 2023. (LitCovid has been accessed millions of times per month.)
  7. DeepLensNet: Deep Learning Automated Diagnosis and Quantitative Classification of Cataract Type and Severity. Ophthalmology, 2022.
  8. Detecting Visually Significant Cataract Using Retinal Photograph-Based Deep Learning. Nature Aging, 2022.
  9. Predicting Myocardial Infarction Through Retinal Scans and Minimal Personal Information. Nature Machine Intelligence, 2022.
  10. Multimodal, Multitask, Multiattention (M3) Deep Learning Detection of Reticular Pseudodrusen: Toward Automated and Accessible Classification of Age-Related Macular Degeneration. Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, 2021. (NLM Honor Award)
  11. LitCovid: An Open Database of COVID-19 Literature. Nucleic Acids Research, 2021.
  12. Keep Up with the Latest Coronavirus Research. Nature, 2021.

Large Language Models in Biomedicine: Selected Paper Series of Our Research

  • Outpatient Reception via Collaboration Between Nurses and a Large Language Model: A Randomized Controlled Trial. Nature Medicine, 2024.
  • Opportunities and Challenges for ChatGPT and Large Language Models in Biomedicine and Health. Briefings in Bioinformatics, 2024.
  • GeneGPT: Augmenting Large Language Models with Domain Tools for Improved Access to Biomedical Information. Bioinformatics, 2024.
  • Advancing Entity Recognition in Biomedicine via Instruction Tuning of Large Language Models. Bioinformatics, 2024.
  • Improving Large Language Models for Clinical Named Entity Recognition via Prompt Engineering. Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, 2024.
  • Large Language Models in Biomedical Natural Language Processing: Benchmarks, Baselines, and Recommendations. 2023.
  • Large Language Models and the Retina: A Review of Current Applications and Future Directions. 2023.

Biomedical Foundation Models: Selected Paper Series of Our Research

  • Me llama: Foundation large language models for medical applications. 2024.
  • Bioformer: an efficient transformer language model for biomedical text mining. 2023.
  • MedCPT: Contrastive Pre-trained Transformers with large-scale PubMed search logs for zero-shot biomedical information retrieval. Bioinformatics. 2023.
  • BioConceptVec: Creating and evaluating literature-based biomedical concept embeddings on a large scale. PLoS computational biology. 2020
  • BioSentVec: creating sentence embeddings for biomedical texts. IEEE International Conference on Healthcare Informatics. 2019
  • BioWordVec, improving biomedical word embeddings with subword information and MeSH. Scientific data. 2019

AI in Healthcare: Selected Paper Series of Our Research

  • A deep network DeepOpacityNet for detection of cataracts from color fundus photographs. Nature Communications Medicine. 2023.
  • DeepLensNet: Deep Learning Automated Diagnosis and Quantitative Classification of Cataract Type and Severity. Ophthalmology, 2022.
  • Detecting Visually Significant Cataract Using Retinal Photograph-Based Deep Learning. Nature Aging, 2022.
  • Predicting Myocardial Infarction Through Retinal Scans and Minimal Personal Information. Nature Machine Intelligence, 2022.
  • Learning Structure from Visual Semantic Features and Radiology Ontology for Lymph Node Classification on MRI, MLMI, 2021.
  • Predicting risk of late age-related macular degeneration using deep learning. NPJ digital medicine, 2020.
  • DeepSeeNet: a deep learning model for automated classification of patient-based age-related macular degeneration severity from color fundus photographs, Ophthalmology, 2019.

For more information, please visit https://sites.google.com/view/qingyuchen/home.

Research at a Glance

Yale Co-Authors

Frequent collaborators of Qingyu Chen's published research.

Publications

2024

Academic Achievements & Community Involvement

  • honor

    National Library of Medicine Honor Award

  • honor

    National Library of Medicine Data Science and Informatics Mentor Awards

  • honor

    Summer Research Mentor Award

  • honor

    Fellows Award for Research Excellence

  • honor

    Summer Research Mentor Award

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