CCADD attended the 2023 Fall Conference of the Korean Society of Medical Informatics (KoSMI) held at HIP(Healthcare Innovation Park) of Seoul National University Bundang Hospital, South Korea. The conference spanned three days from November 29th to December 1^st, both online and offline. Aligned with the theme "Beyond Data: Actionable Health AI", the conference featured 27 symposiums covering various topics, from artificial intelligence in the healthcare to standardization of medical data and digital health.

The first day was conducted online. Particularly, ”Symposium 6: Development of Predictive Models for Cardiovascular Diseases Using Medical Big Data” was noteworthy, where Prof. Howard Lee served as the session chair and speaker, attracting significant attention from the audience with the presentation on ”Improving the Performance of Machine Learning Models for Predicting Acute Coronary Syndrome in Type 2 Diabetes Patients through Substitution of Propensity Scores for Binary Variables”. Also, throughout the conference, the poster presentation was led by David Seung U Lee.

On the second day, each symposium delved into topics of medical data and artificial intelligence applications to the healthcare domain. Themes included "Strategies for the Activation and Commercialization of AI-Based Drug Development" and "Smart Curation of Medical Data: Approaches for Preparing for the Utilization of Medical AI." This encompassed insights into the industry's latest strategies for drug target exploration. In Symposium 9, Dr. Siun Kim delivered a presentation on ”Addressing the challenges of data scarcity and bias of AI-based drug development”. The discourse extensively covered specific manifestations of data scarcity and proposed strategies for mitigation within drug development.

During the final day, the symposiums provided an opportunity to approach the trends in the utilization and data processing methods of developing LLM. Participants delved into the practical approaches for utilizing Real-World Data (RWD) in regulatory decision-making, replicating Randomized Controlled Trials (RCT), and employing common data models. CCADD members exchanged ideas with fellow researchers studying similar research topics, offering a valuable opportunity to comprehend ongoing research trends. It was an insightful symposium for healthcare information researchers to share and discuss the latest trends in research.

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.  

CCADD attended this year's highly anticipated biennial conference hosted by the Korean Society of Medical Informatics (KOSMI). Held at Keimyung University Dongsan Hospital in Daegu, South Korea, the conference spanned two insightful days, supplemented by a three-hour tutorial program.

Under the theme of "Revolution and Innovation in Smart Healthcare," the event delved into an array of captivating topics. Attendees had the privilege of exploring groundbreaking subjects, including the "Application of Large Language Models in Healthcare" and the "Utilization of ChatGPT and Natural Language Processing Models in Medical Research."

Throughout the conference, CCADD seized every moment to absorb valuable lessons. The gathering also served as a catalyst for expanding perspectives and engaging in constructive discussions at this pivotal juncture in the realm of medicine and healthcare. With powerful technologies like ChatGPT emerging, the field is undoubtedly experiencing a wind of change, and KOSMI's conference provided a unique platform to address the challenges and opportunities presented by these advancements.

YeSol had the honor to deliver oral presentation and won the Excellent Research Award at 2022 fall conference hosted by the Korean Society of Medical Informatics(KOSMI). YeSol has presented her work entitled "Effectiveness and safety of sodium-glucose cotransporter-2 inhibitors(SGLT2i) added to mono, dual or triple treatment in patients with type 2 diabetes mellitus(T2DM)". She discussed the additive efficacy in glycemic control and the tolerability of SGLT2i in T2DM patients when combined with other antihyperglycemic agents, such as metformin, sulfonylureas, and dipeptidyl peptidase-4 inhibitors using real-world data. Yoona Choi, TaeKyu Chung, and Yoomin Jeon also contributed to this study as co-researchers, with Professor Howard Lee serving as the principle investigator.

The conference was a three-day event (from Nov 23rd, 2022 to Nov 25th, 2022) and was held at The International Convention Center, Jeonbuk National University, Jeonju, Jeonbuk, South Korea. This conference, the host(KOSMI) organized the event around the theme, "The Power and Value of Healthcare Data Linkage". The conference was full of enlightening speeches that reflected the progress made in the field of medical informatics. With a total of 1,039 participants, this conference was held on the largest scale ever among KOSMI conferences. 

When Prof. Lee decided to attend the AMIA 2019, the annual symposium sponsored by the American Medical Informatics Association, which was held on November 16-20, in Washington DC, USA, he had two objectives in mind. First, Prof. Lee wanted to get an overview of the impending issues and emerging research topics in the field. Second, he wanted to get some insights how those issues and research topics could meld with those at CCADD such that it may adjust, refine, expand, or even cross the border of what it used to day to day in the form of research and project. 

Did Prof. Lee successfully achieve his objectives? Pretty much. Carefully, but rather passively watching and observing what’s happening now in the medical informatics field, which is rather unusual for him, who used to be quite vocal and involving, Prof. Lee realized again that technology may come and go, but the domain doesn’t. It was a pleasant reaffirmation of his longstanding belief. The speakers and audience always emphasized why, rather than how, they did this or that although they were not shy at all of delving into technical complexities when necessary. This AMIA’s ‘put-patients-first’ philosophy was also highlighted by Dr. Tetteh‘s opening keynote speech, who stressed ‘human care’. Wasn’t this the least likely talk that one could expect to hear at an informatics conference? Oh, by the way, Dr. Tetteh is the Chief Medical Information Officer for the US Navy. The audience wholeheartedly responded to Dr. Tetteh’s speech by standing ovation.     

This was very much enlightening to Prof. Lee, given that KOSMI 2019 he had joined just a couple weeks before in Korea was too much packed with technical dudes, who boasted how skillful and advanced they were while failing to or faintly paying due attention to patients, medicine, and the domain. For example, the electronic medical records (EMR) is a great way and tool. But, do we have any evidence that EMR has improved patient outcomes? Has EMR enabled physicians for analyzing patient data more efficiently, assisting them to make better decisions? Not quite so.  

But, don’t get Prof. Lee wrong! Technology is important. “The more we care about the domain, the more we should be fully cognizant of and conversant in the technology”, Prof. Lee spoke up. “What matters, however, is not to lose our perspectives and reasons why we are doing this in the maze of technological overloads”, he added. This understanding led Prof. Lee to his next question. “Have we arrived at a point that encourages CCADD to rethink about its direction?” “Is the timing right?” 

Not sure yet, frankly speaking. However, one thing is clear. CCADD should not postpone asking themselves those questions!   

The 2019 fall conference of The Korean Society of Medical Informatics (KOSMI), organized by Kyungpook National University Hospital (KNUH), was held November 8-9, 2019, at the Global Plaza, Kyunpook National University, Daegu. Prof. Howard Lee, Yoomin Jeon and Junsik Moon participated in the conference.

The conference presented 19 symposia, 6 oral presentation sessions of pre-selected paper submissions, and 3 tutorials in healthcare information, pharmaceutical and big data research which focused on analysis, application and standardization of data based on artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning. Sharing research ideas and analysis techniques, the attendees had an in-depth discussion on emerging issues and utilization in the fields of medical informatics.

On the second day, Prof. Lee chaired one of the oral presentation sessions entitled "New Drug and Pharmacovigilance", where he stressed full understanding of the research domain by communicating with experts in each research field. On the other hand, Yoomin presented two posters titled 'A Dimensionality Reduction Model to Increase the Efficiency and Accuracy of Clinical Trial Feasibility Assessment Using Electronic Medical Records' and 'A CDM-based Clinical Trial to Evaluate the Efficacy and Safety of SGLT2 Inhibitors as Add-on Treatment in Patients with Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus on Metformin, Sulfonylurea and/or DPP-4 Inhibitors'. Yoomin's poster presentations were well received.

Through the conference, the three members of CCADD were delighted to get introduced to the leading academicians and industry experts in the field of medical informatics. Furthermore, Prof. Lee and two CCADD members had a fun discussion that helped them look deeply into their current activities and direction of future research. Their collected insights out of the conference will be further discussed at the upcoming year-end workshop in early December.

Five CCADD members (Prof. Howard Lee, Dr. Soohyun Kim, Yoomin Jeon, Tae Chung, Serin Lee) have attended the Fall conference of The Korean Society of Medical Informatics (KOSMI) held at Chonbuk National University on November 22-23, 2018. The theme of the conference was 'Real World Data to optimize clinical trials', which reflects a growing role and value of big data and artificial intelligence for clinical trials. Over 700 people from academia, public institutions, and the pharmaceutical industry gathered to share their experiences, practices, insights, and perspectives on the more active use of data and information sciences in clinical trials.

Prof. Howard Lee spoke about AI-based patient recruitment in clinical trial in an invited session, entitled 'A Dimensionality Reduction Model to increase the Efficiency and Accuracy of Clinical Trial Feasibility Assessment using Electronic Medical Records(EMR)'. Prof. Lee emphasized the application of AI technology to clinical trial feasibility such as feature selection algorithms in machine learning to identify common sensitive eligibility features (cSEFs). 

Yoomin Jeon and Tae Chung presented a poster at the conference too. Yoomin's poster was about the actual application of what Prof. Lee introduced in his talk. Tae examined the extent of mapping of ICD-10 to MeSH to crosswalk and synchronize different terms collected from different data sources. (Analysis of agreement status between the diagnostic code of MeSH and ICD-10).

Meanwhile, Dr. Soohyun Kim led a tutorial session, where she taught several essential statistical methods for biomedical informatics research using R. 

For more details, you may want to contact Yoomin Jeon or Tae Chung.

Many of CCADD members have attended the Spring Conference of The Korean Society of Medical Informatics (KOSMI), held at Samsung Medical Comprehensive Cancer Center on June 14-15, 2018. Reflecting the recent drastic increase in the demand and importance of data science in health sciences, the theme of the conference was 'Evolving Data for Better Health'. More than 600 researchers, practitioners, and vendors in health informatics gathered together to share their knowledge, experience, results of research, and expertise through a series of keynote speeches, symposia, oral/poster presentations, and exhibitions.

Four abstracts by CCADD were accepted for poster presentation. Yoomin Jeon proposed a new approach to transform clinical trials eligibility criteria (EC, free-text) into structured data using the OMOP-CDM(Feasibility of Using the OMOP Common Data Model to Assess Clinical Trial Feasibility). She found that >75% of the EC could be mapped by the proposed approach, and the most important data group was condition.

Serin Lee, a student intern, gave her poster presentation entitled 'Dimensionality Reduction Model for Common Eligibility Criteria to effectively use Electronic Medical Record: A Pilot Study.' She proposed a dimensionality reduction model for common eligibility features (CEFs) based on ontology and semantic features of EC to reasonably compose the concept sets.

Dr. Soohyun Kim proposed a new type of command data model for clinical trials (Clinical Trial Common Data Model, CT-CDM) to support decision-making processes in clinical trials, entitled 'CDISC-based Common Data Model for Developing an Integrated Decision-Support System in Clinical Trials'. This command data model fully complies with the standards of Clinical Data Interchange Standards Consortium(CDISC) as a global, platform-independent data standard guaranteeing system interoperability. 

Lastly, but not the least, Dr. Jeong-An Gim shared his research findings: Application of Machine Learning Technology to Classify Healthy Subjects into Different Pharmacokinetic Exposure Groups to Tacrolimus. Using the decision-tree approach employed in R, Dr. Gim aimed to identify SNPs that are associated with the exposure to tacrolimus. The rs776746 in the CYP3A5 gene was the most influential mutation.

More detailed research findings can be downloaded below.

Much to everyone's delighted surprise, Serin Lee won an external solid-state drive of 1TB at the raffle draw! Since Serin will graduate in August, the prize was certainly a nice present.