Dr. Qi Long, in collaboration with Dr. Tianlong Chen in the Department of Computer Science at UNC, has been awarded funding by NIH/NIBIB to advance robust and interpretable multi-modal AI for medicine, with specific use cases in cancer and Alzheimer’s disease.
Multi-modal integration in biomedical research offers unique opportunities to advance precision medicine by combining genomics, multi-omics, imaging, and electronic health records data. This project seeks to develop robust and interpretable AI models for the integration of multi-modal biomedical data. The proposed approach will address the challenges of data heterogeneity and missing data in data integration by customizing state-of-the-art AI techniques such as mixture of experts (MoE), building on their recent work on Flex-MoE at NeurIPS 2024 and I2MoE at ICML 2025. Their research is expected to increase the power and rigor of integrative analysis of multi-modal data and lead to deeper insights into complex diseases such as cancer and Alzheimer’s disease.
The Penn team also includes Dr. David Wolk, Professor of Neurology, Chief of the Division of Cognitive Neurology, and Director of the Penn Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center, and Dr. Katherine L. Nathanson, Pearl Basser Professor for BRCA-Related Research and Deputy Director of the Abramson Cancer Center, who will provide domain expertise in AD and cancer, respectively.