Hua Xu, PhD
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Robert T. McCluskey Professor of Biomedical Informatics and Data Science
Vice Chair for Research and Development, Department of Biomedical Informatics and Data Science; Assistant Dean for Biomedical Informatics, Yale School of MedicineBiography
Dr. Hua Xu is a well-known researcher in clinical natural language processing (NLP). He has developed novel algorithms for important clinical NLP tasks such as entity recognition and relation extraction, which have been top ranked in over a dozen of international biomedical NLP challenges. His lab has developed CLAMP, a comprehensive clinical NLP toolkit that has been successfully commercialized and used by hundreds of healthcare organizations. Moreover, he has led multiple national/international initiatives (e.g., Chair of the NLP working group at Observational Health Data Sciences and Informatics - OHDSI program) to apply developed NLP technologies to diverse clinical and translational studies, thus greatly accelerating clinical evidence generation using electronic health records data. Recently, he also utilizes NLP to harmonize metadata of biomedical digital objects (e.g., indexing millions of biomedical datasets to make them findable), with the goal to promote FAIR principles in biomedicine.
Appointments
Biomedical Informatics & Data Science
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Education & Training
- PhD
- Columbia University, Biomedical Informatics
- MS
- New Jersey Institute of Technology, Computer Science
- BS
- Nanjing University, Biochemistry
Research
Publications
Develop and validate a computable phenotype for the identification of Alzheimer's disease patients using electronic health record data
He X, Wei R, Huang Y, Chen Z, Lyu T, Bost S, Tong J, Li L, Zhou Y, Li Z, Guo J, Tang H, Wang F, DeKosky S, Xu H, Chen Y, Zhang R, Xu J, Guo Y, Wu Y, Bian J. Develop and validate a computable phenotype for the identification of Alzheimer's disease patients using electronic health record data. Alzheimer's & Dementia Diagnosis Assessment & Disease Monitoring 2024, 16: e12613. PMID: 38966622, PMCID: PMC11220631, DOI: 10.1002/dad2.12613.Peer-Reviewed Original ResearchElectronic health record dataElectronic health recordsComputable phenotypeHealth record dataManual chart reviewHealth recordsAlzheimer's diseaseDiagnosis codesRecord dataChart reviewUTHealthAlzheimer's disease patientsUniversity of MinnesotaAD diagnosisAD identificationDisease patientsPatientsAlzheimerAD patientsDemographicsDiagnosisDiseaseCodeDataUniversityNLP Applications—Other Biomedical Texts
Roberts K, Xu H, Demner Fushman D. NLP Applications—Other Biomedical Texts. Cognitive Informatics In Biomedicine And Healthcare 2024, 429-444. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-031-55865-8_15.Peer-Reviewed Original ResearchIntroduction to Natural Language Processing of Clinical Text
Demner Fushman D, Xu H. Introduction to Natural Language Processing of Clinical Text. Cognitive Informatics In Biomedicine And Healthcare 2024, 3-11. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-031-55865-8_1.Peer-Reviewed Original ResearchNatural language processingLanguage processingComplex language processingBiomedical natural language processingClinical natural language processingLanguage generation tasksClinical language processingBiomedical language processingLanguage modelClinical textGeneration taskMachine learningDelivery of informationClinical languageLanguageMedical Concept Normalization
Xu H, Demner Fushman D, Hong N, Raja K. Medical Concept Normalization. Cognitive Informatics In Biomedicine And Healthcare 2024, 137-164. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-031-55865-8_6.Peer-Reviewed Original ResearchConcept normalizationDeep learning-based techniquesMedical concept normalizationLearning-based techniquesContemporary machine learningRule-based methodologyAnnotated corpusNLP systemsMachine learningComputing applicationsBiomedical terminologiesNormalization approachStandardized terminologyOntologyTaskLearningDevelopment of Clinical NLP Systems
Xu H, Demner Fushman D. Development of Clinical NLP Systems. Cognitive Informatics In Biomedicine And Healthcare 2024, 301-324. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-031-55865-8_11.Peer-Reviewed Original ResearchLarge language models for biomedicine: foundations, opportunities, challenges, and best practices
Sahoo S, Plasek J, Xu H, Uzuner Ö, Cohen T, Yetisgen M, Liu H, Meystre S, Wang Y. Large language models for biomedicine: foundations, opportunities, challenges, and best practices. Journal Of The American Medical Informatics Association 2024, ocae074. PMID: 38657567, DOI: 10.1093/jamia/ocae074.Peer-Reviewed Original ResearchNatural language processingPrompt tuningNLP applicationsLanguage modelState-of-the-art performanceNLP practitionersNatural language processing applicationsBiomedical NLP applicationsPre-training datasetNatural language understandingNeural network architecture modelNatural language generationBiomedical informatics communityNetwork architecture modelAmerican Medical Informatics Association (AMIAPrompt-tuningFew-shotZero-ShotNLP challengeNLP tasksReinforcement learningHuman feedbackLanguage generationLanguage understandingEvaluation metricsRepurposing non-pharmacological interventions for Alzheimer's disease through link prediction on biomedical literature
Xiao Y, Hou Y, Zhou H, Diallo G, Fiszman M, Wolfson J, Zhou L, Kilicoglu H, Chen Y, Su C, Xu H, Mantyh W, Zhang R. Repurposing non-pharmacological interventions for Alzheimer's disease through link prediction on biomedical literature. Scientific Reports 2024, 14: 8693. PMID: 38622164, PMCID: PMC11018822, DOI: 10.1038/s41598-024-58604-8.Peer-Reviewed Original ResearchConceptsAlzheimer's diseaseManual therapy techniquesR-GCNKnowledge graphAD preventionNon-pharmacological interventionsBiomedical literatureGraph convolutional network modelKG embedding modelsTest setLink prediction modelIntegrated healthConvolutional network modelImprove cognitive functionHighest scoring candidatesDomain expertsEmbedding modelNon-pharmaceutical interventionsReal-world data analysisGround truthPrevent ADCognitive functionTherapy techniquesNetwork modelDiscovery patternsEnsemble pretrained language models to extract biomedical knowledge from literature
Li Z, Wei Q, Huang L, Li J, Hu Y, Chuang Y, He J, Das A, Keloth V, Yang Y, Diala C, Roberts K, Tao C, Jiang X, Zheng W, Xu H. Ensemble pretrained language models to extract biomedical knowledge from literature. Journal Of The American Medical Informatics Association 2024, ocae061. PMID: 38520725, DOI: 10.1093/jamia/ocae061.Peer-Reviewed Original ResearchNatural language processingNatural language processing systemsLanguage modelExpansion of biomedical literatureZero-shot settingManually annotated corpusKnowledge graph developmentTask-specific modelsDomain-specific modelsZero-ShotEntity recognitionBillion parametersEnsemble learningLocation informationKnowledge basesBiomedical entitiesLanguage processingFree textGraph developmentBiomedical conceptsAutomated techniqueBiomedical literatureDetection methodPredictive performanceBiomedical knowledgeDeveloping deep learning-based strategies to predict the risk of hepatocellular carcinoma among patients with nonalcoholic fatty liver disease from electronic health records
Li Z, Lan L, Zhou Y, Li R, Chavin K, Xu H, Li L, Shih D, Zheng W. Developing deep learning-based strategies to predict the risk of hepatocellular carcinoma among patients with nonalcoholic fatty liver disease from electronic health records. Journal Of Biomedical Informatics 2024, 152: 104626. PMID: 38521180, DOI: 10.1016/j.jbi.2024.104626.Peer-Reviewed Original ResearchDeep learning modelsElectronic health recordsHCC risk predictionHealth recordsTime-varying covariatesLearning modelsElectronic health record dataRisk predictionHealth record dataAccuracy of deep learning modelsDeep learning-based strategyCovariate imbalanceDisease prediction tasksLearning-based strategyDeep learning performanceDisease risk predictionEHR databaseClassification problemLength of follow-upTransfer learningFatty liver diseasePrediction taskCarcinoma riskModel trainingRecord dataAdvancing entity recognition in biomedicine via instruction tuning of large language models
Keloth V, Hu Y, Xie Q, Peng X, Wang Y, Zheng A, Selek M, Raja K, Wei C, Jin Q, Lu Z, Chen Q, Xu H. Advancing entity recognition in biomedicine via instruction tuning of large language models. Bioinformatics 2024, 40: btae163. PMID: 38514400, PMCID: PMC11001490, DOI: 10.1093/bioinformatics/btae163.Peer-Reviewed Original ResearchNamed Entity RecognitionSequence labeling taskNatural language processingBiomedical NER datasetsLanguage modelNER datasetsEntity recognitionLabeling taskText generationField of natural language processingBiomedical NERFew-shot learning capabilityReasoning tasksMulti-domain scenariosDomain-specific modelsEnd-to-endMinimal fine-tuningSOTA performanceF1 scoreHealthcare applicationsBiomedical entitiesBiomedical domainLanguage processingMulti-taskingPubMedBERT model
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