The validity of medical studies based on real-world clinical data, such as observational studies, depends on critical assumptions necessary for drawing causal conclusions about medical interventions. Many published studies are flawed because they violate these assumptions and entail biases such as residual confounding, selection bias, and misalignment between treatment and measurement times. Although researchers are aware of these pitfalls, they continue to occur because anticipating and addressing them in the context of a specific study can be challenging without a large, often unwieldy, interdisciplinary team with extensive expertise. To address this expertise gap, we explore the use of large language models (LLMs) as co-pilot tools to assist researchers in identifying study design flaws that undermine the validity of causal inferences. We propose a conceptual framework for LLMs as causal co-pilots that encode domain knowledge across various fields, engaging with researchers in natural language interactions to provide contextualized assistance in study design. We provide illustrative examples of how LLMs can function as causal co-pilots, propose a structured framework for their grounding in existing causal inference frameworks, and highlight the unique challenges and opportunities in adapting LLMs for reliable use in epidemiological research.
Comparing Large Language Models and Traditional Machine Translation Tools for Translating Medical Consultation Summaries: A Pilot Study
Faculty of Information Technology, Monash University(信息技术学院,莫纳什大学);Faculty of Medicine, Nursing and Health Sciences, Monash University(医学、护理与健康科学学院,莫纳什大学);Supportive and Palliative Care Unit, Monash Health(支持与姑息护理单元,莫纳什健康)
Medical Incident Causal Factors and Preventive Measures Generation Using Tag-based Example Selection in Few-shot Learning
Graduate School of Information Science(信息科学研究生院);Technology Hokkaido University Hokkaido, Japan(技术 Hokkaido 大学 Hokkaido, Japan);National Institute of Information(信息国家研究所);Faculty of Information Science(信息科学学院)
Dual Causal Inference: Integrating Backdoor Adjustment and Instrumental Variable Learning for Medical VQA
School of Microelectronics, Tianjin University(天津大学微电子学院);Department of Orthopedics, Affiliated Kunshan Hospital of Jiangsu University(江苏大学附属昆山医院骨科部);Department of Clinical Laboratory, The Third Central Hospital of Tianjin(天津第三中心医院临床实验室);School of Electrical and Information Engineering, Tianjin University(天津大学电气与信息工程学院)
Faithful or Just Plausible? Evaluating the Faithfulness of Closed-Source LLMs in Medical Reasoning
Stratified Precision;Harvard Medical School(哈佛医学院);Imperial College London(帝国理工学院伦敦分校);National Health Service(国家健康服务系统);Ipsen France(Ipsen法国);University College London(伦敦大学学院)
Tri-VQA: Triangular Reasoning Medical Visual Question Answering for Multi-Attribute Analysis
School of Computing;Artificial Intelligence Southwest Jiaotong University Chengdu, China;Artificial Intelligence Southwest Jiaotong University Chengdu, China z\ c\;Institute of Innovative Research Tokyo Institute of Technology Yokohama, Japan
University of Lorraine(洛林大学);French National Research and Safety Institute for the Prevention of Occupational Accidents and Diseases (INRS)(法国国家职业事故与疾病预防研究与安全研究所);Virtual Hospital of Lorraine(洛林虚拟医院);Nancy University Hospital(南锡大学医院);CHRU-Nancy(南锡大学医院中心)
We conducted a pilot study to evaluate the potential and feasibility of back-support exoskeletons to help the caregivers in the Intensive Care Unit (ICU) of the University Hospital of Nancy (France) executing Prone Positioning (PP) maneuvers on patients suffering from severe COVID-19-related Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome. After comparing four commercial exoskeletons, the Laevo passive exoskeleton was selected and used in the ICU in April 2020. The first volunteers using the Laevo reported very positive feedback and reduction of effort, confirmed by EMG and ECG analysis. Laevo has been si…
University of Central Florida(中佛罗里达大学);National Institutes of Health(美国国立卫生研究院);Soochow University(苏州大学)
This study introduced a novel system, called Gaze2Segment, integrating biological and computer vision techniques to support radiologists' reading experience with an automatic image segmentation task. During diagnostic assessment of lung CT scans, the radiologists' gaze information were used to create a visual attention map. This map was then combined with a computer-derived saliency map, extracted from the gray-scale CT images. The visual attention map was used as an input for indicating roughly the location of a object of interest. With computer-derived saliency information, on the other hand…
Imperial College London(帝国理工学院);TU München(慕尼黑工业大学);FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg(埃尔朗根-纽伦堡大学)
Medical image analysis is a vibrant research area that offers doctors and medical practitioners invaluable insight and the ability to accurately diagnose and monitor disease. Machine learning provides an additional boost for this area. However, machine learning for medical image analysis is particularly vulnerable to natural biases like domain shifts that affect algorithmic performance and robustness. In this paper we analyze machine learning for medical image analysis within the framework of Technology Readiness Levels and review how causal analysis methods can fill a gap when creating robust…
This article discusses how the language of causality can shed new light on the major challenges in machine learning for medical imaging: 1) data scarcity, which is the limited availability of high-quality annotations, and 2) data mismatch, whereby a trained algorithm may fail to generalize in clinical practice. Looking at these challenges through the lens of causality allows decisions about data collection, annotation procedures, and learning strategies to be made (and scrutinized) more transparently. We discuss how causal relationships between images and annotations can not only have profound…
Causal Debiasing Medical Multimodal Representation Learning with Missing Modalities
DataLab: Data Science and Informatics, University of California, Davis(加州大学戴维斯分校数据实验室);Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Rochester(罗切斯特大学电气与计算机工程系);Academy for Engineering & Technology, Fudan University(复旦大学工程与技术学院);Department of Computer Science, University of Toronto(多伦多大学计算机科学系);Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, New York University(纽约大学电气与计算机工程系);UC Davis Health(加州大学戴维斯分校医疗中心);Department of Basic Medical Sciences, University of Arizona(亚利桑那大学基础医学系);Department of Computer Science, University of California, Davis(加州大学戴维斯分校计算机科学系)
Monash University(莫纳什大学);Turning Point, Eastern Health Clinical School, Monash University(莫纳什大学东方健康临床学院Turning Point)
Emergency Medical Services (EMS) demand load has become a considerable burden for many government authorities, and EMS demand is often an early indicator for stress in communities, a warning sign of emerging problems. In this paper, we introduce Deep Planning and Policy Making Net (DeepPPMNet), a Long Short-Term Memory network based, global forecasting and inference framework to forecast the EMS demand, analyse causal relationships, and perform `what-if' analyses for policy-making across multiple local government areas. Unless traditional univariate forecasting techniques, the proposed method …
Robust Multimodal Representation Learning in Healthcare
University of California, Davis(加州大学戴维斯分校);HKUST (GZ)(香港科技大学);University of Rochester(罗切斯特大学);Tongji University(同济大学);Georgia Institute of Technology(佐治亚理工学院);Fudan University(复旦大学);The University of British Columbia(不列颠哥伦比亚大学)
MIMM-X: Disentangling Spurious Correlations for Medical Image Analysis
Medical Image and Data Analysis, University Hospital of Tübingen, Germany(医学图像与数据分析,图宾根大学医院,德国);Institute for Signal Processing and System Theory, University of Stuttgart, Germany(信号处理与系统理论研究所,斯图加特大学,德国);Stanford University, Department of Radiology, Stanford, USA(斯坦福大学放射科,斯坦福,美国)
Imperial College London(帝国理工学院);FAU Erlangen-Nuremberg(埃尔朗根-纽伦堡大学)
Curating a large scale medical imaging dataset for machine learning applications is both time consuming and expensive. Balancing the workload between model development, data collection and annotations is difficult for machine learning practitioners, especially under time constraints. Causal analysis is often used in medicine and economics to gain insights about the effects of actions and policies. In this paper we explore the effect of dataset interventions on the output of image classification models. Through a causal approach we investigate the effects of the quantity and type of data we nee…
UNet with Self-Adaptive Mamba-Like Attention and Causal-Resonance Learning for Medical Image Segmentation
Faculty of Computing and IT (FCIT)(计算与信息技术学院);Sohar University(索哈尔大学);Department of Intelligent Systems(智能系统系);KTH Royal Institute of Technology(皇家理工学院);College of Computer and Information Sciences(计算机与信息科学学院);Imam Mohammad Ibn Saud Islamic University (IMSIU)(伊玛目穆罕默德·本·沙特伊斯兰大学);University of Auckland(奥克兰大学);Department of Computer Science, Faculty of Science(科学学院计算机科学系);Northern Border University(北方边境大学)