What is the Laboratory of Pathology Dynamics doing?
We are working vigorously on methods that allow the identification and examination of pathology dynamics. We contend that studying the pathology dynamics is crucial for solving the three C’s: identifying disease Causes, developing, Cures, and improving patient Care. Our approaches include machine learning, artificial intelligence, data science, and first-principles based engineering. These techniques have goals which include examining disease relationships, interactions, feedback, and overall system stability. Our integrative approach enables a comprehensive multifactorial and multi-scalar perspective of disease. Our research delivers algorithms for personalized medicine based on patient attributes like disease co-morbidities, demographics, environmental stressors, and specific multi-scalar and multifactorial underlying pathological or physiological characteristics as measured by clinical tests and biomarkers.
What are our current focuses?
- Literature-based discovery with natural language processing to integrate relationships from 30+ million PubMed articles into predictive knowledge graphs for drug repurposing and novel drug target identification.
- Large language models to integrate multi-scalar and multifactorial disease data into semi-automated meta-analyses that can estimate effect sizes that improve and expedite clinical trials, including for under-studied or rare disease.
- Multi-modal machine learning and network models to assess the pathology dynamics of devastating neurological diseases like Alzheimer’s Disease, Parkinson’s Disease, or Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis
- Event based modeling to better understand the order in which biomarkers precede disease symptoms.
- Disability inclusion by conducting large-scale surveys and analysis on opinions and perceptions of disability in education and employment. In particular, we hypothesize that the higher pay and accessible technology friendly jobs in science, technology, engineering, mathematics (STEM) could be a perfect fit for persons with physical disabilities.
What diseases do we study?
We study all kinds of pathology – neurological, cardiovascular, infectious, cancer, and much more. Our machine learning and computational analyses can be applied to in vitro and in vivo model systems as well as human cohort studies and clinical trials. While we have worked with clinicians and experimentalists across all kinds of pathologies, we have the most internal domain expertise in neurological diseases, such as Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, Alzheimer’s Disease, Parkinson’s Disease, spinal cord injury, and more. In fact, Dr. Mitchell developed and teaches a clinical neurology course for engineers, “Systems Neuropathology and Translational Engineering”.
