Undergraduate student's at this year's Florida Blue research event.
At this year’s Florida Blue undergraduate research event, University of South Florida students, Chukwuma Okoroji and Roy Chen, presented their research on reducing pregnancy related mortality, particularly in low resource regions. Okoroji, a recent USF graduate, earned his Bachelor’s degree in Information Science specializing in Web Development Technologies. He is currently pursuing his Master’s degree in Library and Information Science specializing in medical librarianship. Chen, currently an undergraduate student at USF, majors in Biomedical Sciences with a minor in Psychology. Okoroji began this research after learning about maternal care deserts throughout the United States, particularly affecting women of color. With aspirations to becoming a physician himself, Chen joined the iSchool Health Informatics Research Lab to explore the potentials of artificial intelligence in transforming healthcare.
This year’s Florida Blue event theme “Health Disparities: Explore the Potential of Generative AI to Indicate and Address Health Disparities and Improve Healthcare Outcomes for Underserved Populations” was the perfect theme for Okoroji and Chen to showcase their work. In working towards their ultimate goal, they have been focusing on developing an AI model to help predict risk factors during pregnancy. Through a systematic review of medical research, they identified relevant parameters for the most common fatal complications in pregnant women. With these established, they have begun working on a multi-modal model that will utilize data from images, clinical notes, and other data to output real-time predictions of medical issues during pregnancy. Ultimately physicians would work with their patients to enter the patient’s data and medical history into the AI model, which would then predict possible medical issues. Having a model like this would help doctors streamline how to better care for their patients while also giving the patient more individual agency. The next step in their research is to finish collecting data and build a prototype of the AI model to begin testing.