Learning from Multimodal Data: From Team Dynamics to Precision Medicine | The Center for Technology and Behavioral Health

NOVEMBER 22, 2024

Indrani Bhattacharya, PhD
Assistant Professor
Department of Biomedical Data Science
Center for Precision Health and Artificial Intelligence (CPHAI)
Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth

About the Presentation: Machine learning has immense potential to improve human health and well-being, by assisting humans and augmenting their capabilities in solving the most pressing clinical needs. On the one hand, these machine learning-assisted healthcare systems can help clinicians in disease diagnosis and treatment planning, while on the other hand, these systems can help improve behavioral health, doctor-patient interactions, and overall patient well-being. Since our perception of the world is inherently multimodal, one central research question while developing these systems revolves around how to seamlessly integrate and learn from complementary multimodal data in task-specific ways.

The first part of my talk will discuss some of my doctoral research on developing unobtrusive, privacy-preserving, multimodal sensor fusion and machine learning systems to understand human behavior and team dynamics. The second part of my talk will briefly touch upon some of my current and postdoctoral research on developing multimodal machine learning systems for cancer detection and treatment planning. The talk will end with plans on how I intend to marry my doctoral and postdoctoral research experience to develop machine learning-assisted healthcare systems that not only improve disease diagnosis and treatment planning but also assist in improving the overall health and well-being of patients through behavioral analysis.

About the Presenter:

Dr. Indrani Bhattacharya is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Biomedical Data Science and the Center for Precision Health and Artificial Intelligence (CPHAI). Dr. Bhattacharya’s research interests are in developing human-centered, translational, machine learning systems for healthcare applications. She is specifically interested in investigating how to seamlessly integrate and learn from complementary multimodal imaging and non-imaging data for developing these systems. The two focus areas of her research include: (a) medical imaging-based computational systems to assist clinicians in early disease detection, characterization and treatment planning, and (b) multimodal behavior estimation systems to assess and improve behavioral health, patient wellbeing, and doctor-patient interactions.

Dr. Bhattacharya completed her bachelor’s in electrical engineering from Jadavpur University, India, and her MS and PhD from the Department of Electrical, Computer, and Systems Engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, NY. Thereafter, she joined the Department of Radiology (Division of Integrative Biomedical Imaging Informatics) at Stanford University School of Medicine, CA, as a postdoctoral scholar and continued on as an academic research staff up until she joined Dartmouth. Dr. Bhattacharya’s research has always been highly interdisciplinary, at the intersection of computer vision and machine learning, medicine, and social science research.