Yoona Choi and Jung-Hyun Won attended the 65th Annual Meeting & Exposition of the American Society of Hematology (ASH), which took place from December 9 to 12, 2023, in San Diego, USA. Annually, the ASH conference brings together healthcare professionals, researchers, clinicians, and academics from around the globe to explore advancements in hematology. This prestigious event not only focuses on the study, diagnosis, treatment, and prevention of blood disorders but also features a variety of social events and opportunities for collaboration and the sharing of insights among experts in the field. Official photos from ASH are available here.

At the 'Outcomes Research—Lymphoid Malignancies: Poster II' session, Yoona Choi, serving as the first author and representing the entire research team, presented a study titled 'Evaluating the Effectiveness and Safety of Prephase Steroid Treatment before Remission Induction Chemotherapy in Pediatric Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia: A Common Data Model-Based Real-World Data Approach.' This study investigated steroid pretreatment in pediatric acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) patients undergoing remission induction chemotherapy (RIC), with the aim of reducing complications such as tumor lysis syndrome (TLS). Analyzing data from Seoul National University Hospital and Catholic University Seoul St. Mary’s Hospital, the study compared patients who received steroid pretreatment at least seven days before RIC with those who did not. The findings indicated a significant reduction in TLS incidence in the pretreated group. While overall survival rates were higher in this group, the difference was not statistically significant. These results provide important real-world evidence for the effectiveness of steroid pretreatment in reducing TLS risk in pediatric ALL patients.

This study was part of a larger project, funded by a grant from the Ministry of Health and Welfare, aiming to develop a disease registry database for pediatric ALL using real-world data in the clinical data warehouse (CDW) of Seoul National University Hospital and Catholic University Seoul St. Mary’s Hospital, thereby generating real-world evidence for pediatric ALL. 

Prof. Howard Lee gave a talk at an invited symposium in association with the Annual Conference of the Korean Society of Medical Informatics (KoSMI), held both online and offline on November 29, 2023. The title of his presentation was ‘Performance Increase of the Machine Learning Model to Predict Acute Coronary Syndrome in Patients with Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus by Replacing Binary Variables with Propesnsity Score’. This presentation was a culmination of a research project with the same title supported by the Seokcheon Foundation, 2023, where the current and former CCADD graduate students, namely David Seung U Lee, Jung-Hyun Won, and YeSol Hong collectively contributed by proposing a new novel way to address the falseness of binary feature in the electronic medical records. Prof. Lee's speech was well received by the audience evidenced by 6 follow-up questions! The more detailed methodological aspect of Prof. Lee' talk was presented in an accepted poster led by David Seung U Lee.  

Jung-Hyun Won was invited to the KOREA AI SUMMIT 2022 (“AI for Good”), where she presented the collaboration research project between CCADD (Siun Kim, Jung-Hyun Won, David Seung U Lee, and Prof. Howard) and Microsoft Research Asia (MSRA) entitled “Revisiting and Reformulating Machine Learning-based Drug Repositioning”, orally and as a poster. The Korea AI Summit 2022, organized by AI Innovation Hub, Microsoft Research, IITP, and Korea University AI Research Institute, aimed to provide a platform for academic leaders from the prominent universities and institutes to share and explore the latest developments and technological trends in AI research.

Jung-Hyun Won stated that the team (i.e., CCADD and MSRA) has pointed out problems in the current task formulation of machine learning-based drug repositioning studies. According to Jung-Hyun Won, the team has found the spurious correlation between data collection pattern of drug characteristics and approved indications of drug. They also found that train-test split based on random sampling led to the overestimation of the performances of existing DR models. Jung-Hyun Won stressed that the team is currently reformulating drug repositioning problem as predicting investigational disease and generating eligibility criteria of clinical trials for a drug-disease pair.

Technology showcase can be watched the following youtube thumbnail.

The book 'There's no such thing as K-Quarantine', written by Prof.Howard Lee, Jung-Hyun Won, YeSol Hong and 13 others, was selected in the liberal arts section of the Sejong Cultural Book Program this year. The Sejong Cultural Book Program is organized by the Publication industry Promotion Agency of Korea. This program aims to promote domestic publishing activities and to build a knowledge-based society by selecting outstanding books among those published throughout the year. Books worth 8 million Korean won will be distributed to public libraries nationwide. In 2022, 550 books were selected from a total of 8,698 candidates. The book There's no such thing as K-quarantine was selected as an excellent book in the field of technology science.