KFSCIS Assistant Professor Ananda Mondol received the prestigious National Institute of Health (NIH) Exploratory/Developmental Research Grant Award (R21) from the National Cancer Institute and will serve as the project principal investigator (PI). The proposed research project entitled, “Explainable AI-based Multi-Omics Analysis of Lung Cancer Health Disparity,” is designed to “understand and discover the biological factors of health disparities in lung cancer between African-Americans and European-Americans at the multi-omics level.” An explainable artificial intelligence-based computational framework will be developed using a cooperative game theory-based machine learning approach.
The approach will first identify patient specific tumor heterogeneity or disparity information, and then identify cohort specific disparity information. Finally, the approach will be used to discover disparities between two cohorts. The developed tool will help decipher the race and sex specific risk factors such as African-American males, European-American males, African-American females, European-American females, and other subcategories which will guide better treatment strategies.
Dr. Jason Liu stated, “Our School has continuously demonstrated research strengths in supporting FIU’s strategic pillars, in areas such as foundational AI research, AI and health, AIN environment and environmental resilience, cyber security, computing systems and cyber infrastructures. This award is a good example of our strengths in AI and health.”
Prof. Mondol will be the principal investigator for this research and will be joined in a multidisciplinary effort by Prof. Charles Dimitroff of the Herbert Wertheim College of Medicine and Prof. Mary Jo Trepka of the Robert Stemple College of Public Health and Social Work, will serve as co-principal investigators for the project.
This National Institute of Health, National Cancer Institute grant is expected to total $370,600 over the next two years.