Helen Chen

Some of Professor Chen's most recent published research include; "Revealing Common and Rare Patterns for Peritoneal Dialysis Eligibility Decisions with Association Discovery and Disentanglement," "Factors affecting treatment selection and overall survival for first-line EGFR-tyrosine kinase inhibitor therapy in non-small-cell lung cancer," and "A new concordant partial AUC and partial c statistic for imbalanced data in the evaluation of machine learning algorithms." 

Professor Chen conducts medical Natural Language Processing (NLP) research, particularly NLP in medical text, electronic patient records, and real-world evidence. She has undertaken projects related to ICD coding and published a paper on UmlsBERT. UmlsBERT is an area she is interested in researching further. 

Real-World Data (RWD) and Real-World Evidence (RWE) is another focus of Professor Chen's. Professor Chen is the founding director and a board member of CPHIN, a healthcare system that uses data and innovation to improve health outcomes for Canadians. CPHIN convenes healthcare stakeholders and orchestrates initiatives that accelerate system transformation to enable personalized healthcare in Canada. One of CPHIN's foundational activities is the Real-World Evidence and Access Canadian Healthcare (REACH) program. They support Health Canada and CADTH in developing a framework that will allow for RWD/E in decision-making throughout the lifecycle of a medication.  CPHIN is working with Roche Canada and BC Cancer to provide personalized, AI-generated cancer treatment plans developed from Real-World Data. Another program, the Lung Kick Start Program, aims to determine, through real-world data, the sequencing of testing and treatment that produces the best health outcomes for specific lung cancer patients.  

A recent project that Professor Chen has been working on explores the topic of social media data infodemics and info surveillance. Professor Chen uses AI-assisted technology to identify missed information, especially infodemics in public health and health promotion. It focuses on social media and its roles in public health, the pandemic and emerging infectious diseases.