Presenter:  Majid Afshar, MD, MSCR, Assistant Professor, Department of Medicine, Division of Allergy, Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine and Department of Biostatistics and Medical Informatics, Co-Director, Critical Care Medicine Data Science Lab, University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health, Physician Informaticist and Pulmonary and Critical Care Physician, UW Health.

Topic:  “From Lab to Bedside: A Team Science Approach for Translational Natural Language Processing for Clinical Decision Support”

Abstract:  Dr. Afshar is a physician-scientist and maintains an NIH-funded clinical informatics laboratory dedicated to the prevention and early identification of diseases with a focus on translational natural language processing (NLP). The lab employs methods in NLP and machine learning with a multi-disciplinary team of scientists to support the full life cycle of data science. Dr. Afshar has built an infrastructure to perform NLP and machine learning tasks with electronic health record data for high throughput computable phenotypes and applied predictive modelling. He practices clinically as an intensivist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison where he takes care of patients with conditions that are also the focus of his research. He currently has an NIH R01 to implement and study NLP models in the health system and examine the effectiveness of AI-driven tools for clinical decision support. He is also the Director of the Learning Health System for the Institute of Clinical and Translational Research at UW. His talk will focus on a real-time NLP pipeline at UW Health for opioid misuse screening, building a Substance Misuse Data Commons, and helping to advance the field of diagnostic decision support systems using methods in NLP.