Jerry Li

Jerry  Li
Eric and Wendy Schmidt Center Funded Research and Innovation Scholar
Advisor: Caroline Uhler
Department: Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Areas of Research: Computational Biology
Years: 2022-2023
Research Project Title:

Survival Prediction using Self-Supervised Multimodal Pretraining

abstract:For fields such as cancer treatment, it is crucial for us to understand how genetic alterations are reflected in tissue histology. A complete understanding of both is critical for tasks such as assessing patient risk and predicting survival outcomes. My project intends to build upon our current knowledge of genotype-phenotype associations by pretraining multimodal models - incorporating both tissue images and genomic information from The Cancer Genome Atlas - in a self-supervised manner, before fine-tuning on the task of survival outcome prediction. I leverage multimodal transformers with a masked pretraining strategy to gain a cohesive genotype-phenotype understanding.
About:

Through this SuperUROP project, I hope to apply my machine learning knowledge (particularly from 6.864 and 6.869) to an advanced research project. I’m very excited to explore deep learning’s applications in the medical/biological fields and to continue to hone my technical skills, while making a meaningful contribution to my group. Ultimately, I am hopeful that this project may evolve into (or at least be good experience for) a future MEng thesis.