Boning Tong, a student in the Department of Bioengineering, has been awarded the Distinguished Paper Award from the AMIA 2024 Annual Symposium. The Awards Committee recognizes five notable papers that best encapsulate the potential of tremendous breakthroughs in the medical community. Ms. Tong works in the laboratory of Dr. Li Shen, who acts as her doctoral advisor and is a professor of Informatics in Biostatistics and Epidemiology.
“Our research tackles challenges in early Alzheimer’s Disease detection by addressing diagnosis label imbalances and fairness issues simultaneously in machine learning models,” said Ms. Tong. “Unlike traditional models, our approach achieves better prediction performance while minimizing bias related to sensitive factors like race, sex, and age. This advancement holds promise for improving the reliability and fairness of early AD detection, ultimately aiding better patient outcomes and equitable care.”
In the future, Ms. Tong plans to take the research they have gained and use them to obtain greater amounts of data. “Our plan is to apply our proposed model to other datasets with larger sample size and more detailed attribute subgroup information to explore the bias issue in AD further,” said Ms. Tong.
Ms. Tong’s work was supported by NIH grants and the ADNI data sets were obtained from the Alzheimer’s Disease Neuroimaging Initiative Database.
Boning Tong Wins Distinguished Paper Award
