This study aimed to utilize text processing and natural language processing (NLP) models to mine clinical notes for the diagnosis of periodontitis and to evaluate the performance of a named entity recognition (NER) model on different regular expression (RE) methods. Two complexity levels of RE methods were used to extract and generate the training data. The SpaCy package and RoBERTa transformer models were used to build the NER model and evaluate its performance with the manual-labeled gold standards. The comparison of the RE methods with the gold standard showed that as the complexity increased in the RE algorithms, the F1 score increased from 0.3-0.4 to around 0.9. The NER models demonstrated excellent predictions, with the simple RE method showing 0.84-0.92 in the evaluation metrics, and the advanced and combined RE method demonstrating 0.95-0.99 in the evaluation. This study provided an example of the benefit of combining NER methods and NLP models in extracting target information from free-text to structured data and fulfilling the need for missing diagnoses from unstructured notes.

The Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning Consortium to Advance Health Equity and Researcher Diversity (AIM-AHEAD program) was created to combat harmful biases in how artificial intelligence and machine learning is used. KERA's Justin Martin talked with UNTHSC's Dr. Jamboor Vishwanatha, about what this means for North Texas. AIM-AHEAD is a consortium to promote artificial intelligence and machine learning to achieve health equity and also diversify the research workforce that is involved in the AI (artificial intelligence) and ML (machine learning) work. So it basically attacks two different issues. One is the lack of diversity in the data that is currently used in the AI/ML field.

I read an interesting article this week, about the future of leisure vs. the future of work, which in a way reflected what I was chatting about in my post about future proofing. The article goes on to posit that leisure-time is going to be an important component of the future, as more and more rote and repetitive jobs get given to AI and possibly robots. The article encourages teachers to consider how the arts, volunteerism, citizenship and self-development could enable the people of the future to make better use of their leisure time to, with a bit of hyperbole, make the world a better place. Having said all of that, apropos of nothing, today's blog is actually about STEM-driven education, (and all the future proofing that entails) and explores what I now realize (after spending an inordinate amount of time researching the subject) is quite a disorganized subject: how does interior design and architecture impact on our ability to study? Traditional classroom layouts (sometimes called the "graveyard layout") have long been identified as a obstacle in addressing different learning modes.