Current ophthalmology clinical workflows are plagued by over-referrals, long waits, and complex and heterogeneous medical records. Large language models (LLMs) present a promising solution to automate various procedures such as triaging, preliminary tests like visual acuity assessment, and report summaries. However, LLMs have demonstrated significantly varied performance across different languages in natural language question-answering tasks, potentially exacerbating healthcare disparities in Low and Middle-Income Countries (LMICs). This study introduces the first multilingual ophthalmological question-answering benchmark with manually curated questions parallel across languages, allowing for direct cross-lingual comparisons. Our evaluation of 6 popular LLMs across 7 different languages reveals substantial bias across different languages, highlighting risks for clinical deployment of LLMs in LMICs. Existing debiasing methods such as Translation Chain-of-Thought or Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) by themselves fall short of closing this performance gap, often failing to improve performance across all languages and lacking specificity for the medical domain. To address this issue, We propose CLARA (Cross-Lingual Reflective Agentic system), a novel inference time de-biasing method leveraging retrieval augmented generation and self-verification. Our approach not only improves performance across all languages but also significantly reduces the multilingual bias gap, facilitating equitable LLM application across the globe.

Mental disorders are among the most widespread diseases globally. Analyzing functional brain networks through functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) is crucial for understanding mental disorder behaviors. Although existing fMRI-based graph neural networks (GNNs) have demonstrated significant potential in brain network feature extraction, they often fail to characterize complex relationships between brain regions and demographic information in mental disorders. To overcome these limitations, we propose a learnable NeuroTree framework that integrates a $k$-hop AGE-GCN with neural ordinary differential equations (ODEs) and contrastive masked functional connectivity (CMFC) to enhance similarities and dissimilarities of brain region distance. Furthermore, NeuroTree effectively decodes fMRI network features into tree structures, which improves the capture of high-order brain regional pathway features and enables the identification of hierarchical neural behavioral patterns essential for understanding disease-related brain subnetworks. Our empirical evaluations demonstrate that NeuroTree achieves state-of-the-art performance across two distinct mental disorder datasets. It provides valuable insights into age-related deterioration patterns, elucidating their underlying neural mechanisms. The code and datasets are available at https://github.com/Ding1119/NeuroTree.

The excessive consumption of marijuana can induce substantial psychological and social consequences. In this investigation, we propose an elucidative framework termed high-order graph attention neural networks (HOGANN) for the classification of Marijuana addiction, coupled with an analysis of localized brain network communities exhibiting abnormal activities among chronic marijuana users. HOGANN integrates dynamic intrinsic functional brain networks, estimated from functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), using graph attention-based long short-term memory (GAT-LSTM) to capture temporal network dynamics. We employ a high-order attention module for information fusion and message passing among neighboring nodes, enhancing the network community analysis. Our model is validated across two distinct data cohorts, yielding substantially higher classification accuracy than benchmark algorithms. Furthermore, we discern the most pertinent subnetworks and cognitive regions affected by persistent marijuana consumption, indicating adverse effects on functional brain networks, particularly within the dorsal attention and frontoparietal networks. Intriguingly, our model demonstrates superior performance in cohorts exhibiting prolonged dependence, implying that prolonged marijuana usage induces more pronounced alterations in brain networks. The model proficiently identifies craving brain maps, thereby delineating critical brain regions for analysis.

Traditional diagnosis of chronic diseases involves in-person consultations with physicians to identify the disease. However, there is a lack of research focused on predicting and developing application systems using clinical notes and blood test values. We collected five years of Electronic Health Records (EHRs) from Taiwan's hospital database between 2017 and 2021 as an AI database. Furthermore, we developed an EHR-based chronic disease prediction platform utilizing Large Language Multimodal Models (LLMMs), successfully integrating with frontend web and mobile applications for prediction. This prediction platform can also connect to the hospital's backend database, providing physicians with real-time risk assessment diagnostics. The demonstration link can be found at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oqmL9DEDFgA

Electronic health records (EHRs) are multimodal by nature, consisting of structured tabular features like lab tests and unstructured clinical notes. In real-life clinical practice, doctors use complementary multimodal EHR data sources to get a clearer picture of patients' health and support clinical decision-making. However, most EHR predictive models do not reflect these procedures, as they either focus on a single modality or overlook the inter-modality interactions/redundancy. In this work, we propose MEDFuse, a Multimodal EHR Data Fusion framework that incorporates masked lab-test modeling and large language models (LLMs) to effectively integrate structured and unstructured medical data. MEDFuse leverages multimodal embeddings extracted from two sources: LLMs fine-tuned on free clinical text and masked tabular transformers trained on structured lab test results. We design a disentangled transformer module, optimized by a mutual information loss to 1) decouple modality-specific and modality-shared information and 2) extract useful joint representation from the noise and redundancy present in clinical notes. Through comprehensive validation on the public MIMIC-III dataset and the in-house FEMH dataset, MEDFuse demonstrates great potential in advancing clinical predictions, achieving over 90% F1 score in the 10-disease multi-label classification task.

The stock market is characterized by a complex relationship between companies and the market. This study combines a sequential graph structure with attention mechanisms to learn global and local information within temporal time. Specifically, our proposed “GAT-AGNN” module compares model performance across multiple industries as well as within single industries. The results show that the proposed framework outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in predicting stock trends across multiple industries on Taiwan Stock datasets.

Considering the temporal order of user-item interactions for recommendation forms a novel class of recommendation algorithms in recent years, among which sequential recommendation models are the most popular approaches. Although, theoretically, such fine-grained modeling should be beneficial to the recommendation performance, these sequential models in practice greatly suffer from the issue of data sparsity as there are a huge number of combinations for item sequences. To address the issue, we propose LSTPR, a graph-based matrix factorization model that incorporates both high-order graph information and long short-term user preferences into the modeling process. LSTPR explicitly distinguishes long-term and short-term user preferences and enriches the sparse interactions via random surfing on the user-item graph. Experiments on three recommendation datasets with temporal user-item information demonstrate that the proposed LSTPR model achieves significantly better performance than the seven baseline methods.