Penn Medicine researchers will help lead the development of an algorithm to flag patients at risk of rare disease thanks to a $4.7 million NIH grant. This 4-year U01 will involve 10 national health systems (with a total of 27 million patients) for developing federated learning and transfer learning algorithms using real-world data for early detection of rare diseases.
The efforts to develop this prediction method, called “PANDA: Predictive Analytics via Networked Distributed Algorithms for multi-system diseases,” will be led by principal investigators from the DBEI Drs. Yong Chen, Professor of Biostatistics, and Peter A. Merkel, Chief of Rheumatology and a Professor of Medicine and Epidemiology, as well as Jiang Bian, Chief Data Scientist of the University of Florida Health System and a Professor in the Health Outcomes & Biomedical Informatics at the University of Florida College of Medicine.