One skill that change makers can apply to advance human health is applying creativity to solve new problems. Here, we propose (3) tips to help you ‘think out of the box’ and sharpen your impact.

Tip 1: Have fun along the way! Children have a spark of creativity that adapts and builds fresh. This way of thinking ‘new’ is essential to solve old problems with innovation. This picture of two children playing in a box reminded me of being five years old and coloring on the side of a stack of moving boxes that I was keen to make into a giant fort! Ask your self when you last laughed facing a challenge at work with joy and a light heart and smiled as a new possibility popped into mind.

Tip 2: Start differently! Have you ever found that your daily routine was stagnant? You drank coffee from the same cup, drove to work the same way, and followed the same process to answer all your emails and work? When is the last time, you ‘mixed it up’ and chose a different cup, went to a coffee shop, talked with someone from a different field, and started the day thinking before doing? Sometimes intentionally mixing it up, frees you from falling into mental constructs that are algorithmic. Just by being different in your day, you experience new ideas.

Tip 3: Ponder the impact that is bigger! Stepping back and looking at the greater whole, sometimes we can get a new vista about how to transfer an application in one field to a solution in our own, a vulnerability that was unseen, or a connectedness. Either way, stepping back and having permission to let your ‘mind wander’ can help you see a picture that is broader and further refine your approach. Take time to go for a walk, look at the sky, and connect with someone new – life is short, time is precious, and meaningful impact is just ‘one open box’ away.

Amy M. Sitapati, MD

Interim Chief, Division of Biomedical Informatics, UCSD

Interim Chair, Department of Biomedical Informatics, UCSDH

Pronouns: she/her/hers

UCSD’s Altman Clinical and Translational Research Institute (ACTRI) has received a seven-year, $80 million Clinical and Translational Science Award (CTSA) from the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS), part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). This distinguished award marks the institute’s fourth consecutive CTSA since its founding in 2008 and stands among the university’s largest federal research grants. DBMI faculty, Michael Hogarth, MD, serves as the co-principal investigator of the CTSA. The award supports ACTRI’s vision to build a more responsive clinical research ecosystem—one that serves communities across Southern California, accelerates scientific discovery, expands access to groundbreaking therapies, and cultivates the next generation of health innovators. ACTRI plays a central role in UC San Diego’s clinical research, offering essential resources, administrative support, and funding opportunities for investigators. As one of 60 national CTSA hubs, it connects partner institutions to shared research infrastructure. The new grant expands this network to include Eisenhower Health, Rady Children’s Hospital, the VA San Diego Healthcare System, and El Centro Regional Medical Center, joining existing collaborators such as Mesa College, the Salk Institute, the La Jolla Institute for Immunology, and Sanford Burnham Prebys. We invite you to read more about the grant and ACTRI’s plan to use it here. 

DBMI Chief and Chair, Amy Sitapati, MD, has been appointed as co-chair of the EPIC Cosmos Governing Council and looks forward to supporting local, UC, and national community in this role. EPIC Cosmos is a dataset available through EPIC that provides a comprehensive and de-identified view of patient records, enabling research, clinical decision support, and quality improvement initiatives. UCSD Health implemented EPIC Cosmos into their health system earlier this year, with the support of various staff and faculty, Including Dr. Sitapati. The EPIC Cosmos Governing Council consists of 15 members elected by their peers to represent the community and oversee the Cosmos Rules of the Road. Dr. Sitapati currently serves as the only UC San Diego representative. If you’d like to learn more about EPIC Cosmos and its impact, we invite you to read more here.

DBMI faculty, Sally Baxter, MD, MSc, was awarded UCSD’s 2025 Health Sciences Faculty Excellence in Mentoring Award. This award is presented to three faculty members who have demonstrated exceptional commitment to mentoring junior faculty, residents, fellows, postdoctoral scholars, and students in academic medicine and the health sciences. The awards are part of a multi-year initiative by the Health Sciences Faculty Mentor Training Program (FMTP), which seeks to foster mentoring excellence by recognizing both individuals and departments/divisions for their contributions to building a culture of excellence at UC San Diego. We invite you to reach more about the Excellence in Mentoring Awards here. 

DBMI joint-appointed faculty, Pengtao Xie, PhD, led a team of student researchers in developing an AI tool capable of learning image segmentation from a small number of expert-labeled samples. The tool improves upon a process called medical image segmentation, where every pixel in an image is labeled based on what it represents — for example, cancerous or normal tissue. The process is traditionally done by a highly trained expert, and deep learning-based methods. However, limitations with deep learning-based methods is they require large amounts of pixel-by-pixel annotated images to learn. The AI tool developed by Dr. Xie and his team cut the amount of data usually required by up to 20 times. The tool has the potential to lead to faster and affordable diagnostic tools within healthcare facilities with limited resources. It has already been tested on a variety of medical image segmentation tasks and has shown success in learning how to identify skin lesions in dermoscopy images, breast cancer in ultrasound scans, and placental vessels in fetoscopic images, for example. We invite you to read more about the AI tool here.

DBMI Chief and Chair, Amy Sitapati, MD, and colleague Jennifer Le, Pharm D were invited to present at the Scientific Conference Celebrating the 105-year history and the 55th anniversary of the merger of Saint Paul Hospital in Vietnam. This special event offered an opportunity to reflect on the hospital’s rich history and growth, while also serving as a platform to strengthen collaboration, share professional knowledge, and promote partnerships in medical examination and treatment. Dr. Sitapati’s presentation focused on AI-Driven Decision Support for Outpatient Parenteral Antibiotic Therapy (OPAT). Dr. Sitapati was incredibly impressed at the innovation and generosity of the Saint Paul Hospital team as they had launched pharmacy specific chatbots in Vietnamese for their patients to help with medication literacy, dosing, and side effect information.

Join us as we celebrate three incredible work anniversaries during the months of September and October! 

Brian Fox – 12 years

Tracy Layton, MS – 16 years

DBMI congratulates each of you on these amazing milestones! We are extremely grateful for the hard work, dedication, and passion each of you bring to our team every day. Congratulations, Brian, and Tracy!     

We invite you to help us celebrate our most recent DBMI birthdays! Happy Birthday to the following DBMI’ers!

Kathleen Curtius, PhD - September 15th

Robert El-Kareh, MD - October 18th

DBMI Predocs, Brian Johnson and Hyrum Eddington, along with their mentor DBMI faculty member, Kathleen Curtius, PhD, co-authored a study that examined the use of thorough validation for health data extraction using large language models (LLMs). The team developed and validated an approach using large language models (LLMs) to accurately extract histopathologic diagnoses from unstructured pathology reports in the Veterans Health Administration (VHA) database. By applying simple “yes/no” prompts to identify colorectal dysplasia and cancer, the team achieved F1-scores exceeding 95% across multiple diagnostic categories. This method, validated against more than 3,800 manually reviewed reports, demonstrated that LLMs can reliably interpret complex medical text—even in resource-limited settings. The findings highlight the potential of AI to enhance data accuracy in electronic health records and support large-scale precision medicine research. We invite you to read the full publication here.

DBMI predoc, Wilfredo Gonzalez-Rivera shared some highlights of his summer. Wilfredo was recently selected as a Human Genetics Scholars Initiative (HGSI) scholar for the American Society of Human Genetics conference. The HGSI scholarship is very prestigious in the field of human genetics! Wilfredo was one of four scholars selected this year to receive it, with his abstract getting recognized as being in the top 10% of about 8,000 abstracts. Wilfredo was also selected for the ¡Lánzate!/Take Off! Higher Education Travel Award Program. This program helps make higher education more accessible by supporting students with the greatest need to stay connected to home and school. The program awards undergraduate and graduate students with roundtrip flights across the country. Lastly, Wilfredo was also invited this summer by the ABRCMS conference to serve as a judge for their computational biology section posters / talks and will be helping UCSD in their outreach booth. Congratulations to Wilfredo! We thank you for sharing.

Did you know that you can give recognition to another UCSD Health employee using the MyPerformance system? Go into MyPerformance (Blink > Personal > UCLearning > MyPerformance > Continuous Feedback > Provide Recognition) to give them a shout-out. The staff member will receive notice of the positive recognition, and their supervisor will be cc’ed. If you received fantastic service from someone in IT, HR, housekeeping, or a colleague, don’t hesitate to use the system to thank them.

Did you know that DBMI has a virtual suggestion box where you can provide anonymous feedback? You can access that here. You can also access the virtual suggestion box on the DBMI website – scroll to the bottom of the homepage and click on the feedback link.

Rojas-Carabali W, Cifuentes-González C, Goetz K, Cicinelli MV, Thng ZX, Baxter SL, Tsui E, Mahendradas P, Biswas J, Androudi S, Curi ALL, Ho SL, Adán A, La Distia Nora R, Silveira C, Nascimento H, Furtado JM, Muccioli C, Mejía-Salgado G, Urzua CA, Garweg JG, Schlaen A, Wei X, Balamurugan S, Kharel Sitaula R, Putera I, Rudzinski M, Babu K, Westcott M, Belfort R Jr, Smith JR, Gomez-Marin J, Nguyen QD, Gupta V, Agrawal R, de-la-Torre A. Common data elements for observational studies in ocular toxoplasmosis: a Delphi consensus. J Ophthalmic Inflamm Infect. 2025 Sep 24;15(1):68. doi: 10.1186/s12348-025-00525-2. PMID: 40993348 Free PMC article.

Akther S, Su M, Wang JC, Amin H, Taki F, De La Cruz N, Chowdhury M, Clabby T, Kopping E, Ruiz VE, Leelawong M, Latash J, Johnson K, Baumgartner J, Wong M, Olsen A, Fowler RC, Pekar JE, Havens JL, Vasylyeva TI, Wertheim JO, Hughes S, Omoregie E. Genomic epidemiology of mpox virus during the 2022 outbreak in New York City. Nat Commun. 2025 Sep 24;16(1):8354. doi: 10.1038/s41467-025-60486-x. PMID: 40993147 Free PMC article.

Horman SF, Kviatkovsky M, Castillo E, Maysent P, VanDenBerg C, Bell J, Longhurst CA. Virtual Transition of Care Clinics and Associated Readmission Rates: 3-Year Retrospective Cohort Study. JMIR Med Inform. 2025 Sep 23;13:e73495. doi: 10.2196/73495. PMID: 40987450

Park BH, Hsu CN, Nguyen A, Zhou YQ, Gabriel RA. Improving postoperative length of stay forecasting with retrieval-augmented prediction. J Am Med Inform Assoc. 2025 Sep 18:ocaf154. doi: 10.1093/jamia/ocaf154. Online ahead of print. PMID: 40973169

Johnson B, Bath T, Huang X, Lamm M, Earles A, Eddington H, Dornisch AM; VA Million Veteran Program; Jih LJ, Gupta S, Shah SC, Curtius K. Large language models for extracting histopathologic diagnoses of colorectal cancer and dysplasia from electronic health records. BMJ Open Gastroenterol. 2025 Sep 18;12(1):e001896. doi: 10.1136/bmjgast-2025-001896. PMID: 40973184 Free PMC article.

Cunha E Rocha K, Tan B, Kempf J, Medina C, Beldona V, Qian C, Duan Y, Xiang Q, Yoo A, Du X, Majithia AR, Ying W. Adipose tissue macrophage-derived miR-690 modulates adipocyte precursor cell maintenance and adipogenesis. Mol Metab. 2025 Sep 3:102246. doi: 10.1016/j.molmet.2025.102246. Online ahead of print. PMID: 40912400

Solitano V, Ahuja D, Lee HH, Gaikwad R, Yeh KH, Facciorusso A, Singh AG, Ma C, Ananthakrishnan AN, Yuan Y, Singh N, Jairath V, Singh S. Comparative Safety of JAK Inhibitors vs TNF Antagonists in Immune-Mediated Inflammatory Diseases: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis. JAMA Netw Open. 2025 Sep 2;8(9):e2531204. doi: 10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2025.31204. PMID: 40928778 Free PMC article.

Florez N, Patel S, Wakelee HA, Rotow J, Shum E, Sands J, Salgia R, Hirsch FR, Peters S, Sabari J, Husain H, Bazhenova L, Massarelli E, Backhus LM, Lee P, Herbst RS, Bestvina C, Higgins K, Desai A, Dietrich M, Keshava HB, Halmos B, Gandara DR, Riess JW, Velázquez AI, Sibley A, Shields M, Sen T, Kim ES. Clinical strategies for lung cancer management: Recommendations from the Bridging the Gaps Lung Cancer Consensus Conference 2024. Cancer. 2025 Sep 1;131(17):e70060. doi: 10.1002/cncr.70060. PMID: 40856114 Review.

Hosalkar H, Meller L, Jalbout NDE, Shoji MK, Baxter SL, Kikkawa DO. Rare Orbital Metastasis of Carcinoid Tumor Despite Long-Term Somatostatin Therapy: A Case Report. Reports (MDPI). 2025 Aug 28;8(3):158. doi: 10.3390/reports8030158. PMID: 40981116 Free PMC article

Kobayashi E, Linden-Santangeli NJ, Chan N, Toomey CB, Mudaliar S, Temprosa M, Edelstein S, Goyal R, Rangamani P, Majithia AR; Diabetes Prevention Program Research Group. Longitudinal Metabolic Trajectories in Diabetes Prevention Program Participants Reveal Subgroups With Varying Micro- and Macrovascular Complication Risks. Diabetes Care. 2025 Aug 26:dc250866. doi: 10.2337/dc25-0866. Online ahead of print. PMID: 40857122

Noor NM, Zheng H, Robertson DS, Singh S. Revolutionizing IBD Clinical Trials with Bayesian Approaches. Inflamm Bowel Dis. 2025 Aug 25:izaf182. doi: 10.1093/ibd/izaf182. Online ahead of print. PMID: 40854291 No abstract available.

Langevin R, Mohanraj D, Shah L, Sabin J, Wood BR, Pratt W, Weibel N, Hartzler AL. Envisioning the future of primary care: intervention strategies to support patient-centered communication feedback technology. J Am Med Inform Assoc. 2025 Aug 23:ocaf143. doi: 10.1093/jamia/ocaf143. Online ahead of print. PMID: 40848279

Morse B, Reale C, Nguyen AT, Latella E, Bauguess H, Anders S, Roberts P, SooHoo SL, El-Kareh R, Soares A, Schilling L. Clinician Needs and Requirements for a Decision Aid Navigator: Qualitative Study. JMIR Hum Factors. 2025 Aug 21;12:e69756. doi: 10.2196/69756. PMID: 40840367

Singh S, Brensinger C, Pate V, Kaplan GG, Kappelman MD, Lewis JD; IBD in Hispanic Individuals Study Group. Incidence and Prevalence of Inflammatory Bowel Diseases in Hispanic Individuals in the United States, 2011-2020. Clin Gastroenterol Hepatol. 2025 Aug 19:S1542-3565(25)00702-5. doi: 10.1016/j.cgh.2025.08.008. Online ahead of print. PMID: 40840791 No abstract available.

Guccione C, Dantas Machado AC, Youssef F, Angeli-Pahim I, Duarte S, Warren C, Farmer S, Humphrey G, Richter RA, McDonald D, Weng Y, Burgoyne A, Loomba R, Curtius K, Zarrinpar A, Knight R, Zarrinpar A. Blood microbial DNA signature differentiates hepatocellular carcinoma from metastatic lesions. eGastroenterology. 2025 Aug 14;3(3):e100193. doi: 10.1136/egastro-2025-100193. eCollection 2025. PMID: 40843454 Free PMC article. No abstract available.

Corroon J, Bradley R, Grant I, Bancks MP, Jakob J, Auer R, Reis JP, Allen N, Yeh KH, Allison MA. Lifetime Cannabis Use and Incident Hypertension: The Coronary Artery Risk Development in Young Adults (CARDIA) Study. Hypertension. 2025 Aug 11. doi: 10.1161/HYPERTENSIONAHA.125.25005. Online ahead of print. PMID: 40785536

Kalavacherla S, Bendik J, Victor M, Carter H, Califano JA, Guo T. Aberrant Splicing Burden Predicts Immune Infiltration and Prognosis in Head and Neck Squamous Cell Carcinomas. Head Neck. 2025 Aug 4. doi: 10.1002/hed.70007. Online ahead of print. PMID: 40755385

 Ahuja D, Yeh KH, Patel SB, Lee HH, Goodwin SW, Solitano V, Ma C, Ananthakrishnan AN, Singh N, Jairath V, Xu R, Singh S. Comparative Safety of Janus Kinase inhibitors vs. Tumor Necrosis Factor Antagonists in Patients with Inflammatory Bowel Diseases. Clin Gastroenterol Hepatol. 2025 Jul 28:S1542-3565(25)00642-1. doi: 10.1016/j.cgh.2025.06.041. Online ahead of print. PMID: 40738278

Lee HH, Yuan Y, Boland BS, Chang JT, Jairath V, Singh S. Efficacy of Advanced Therapies in Achieving Remission by Disease Location in Crohn's Disease: A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis. Clin Gastroenterol Hepatol. 2025 Jul 23:S1542-3565(25)00615-9. doi: 10.1016/j.cgh.2025.07.009. Online ahead of print. PMID: 40712715 Review.

Chan F, Lin WC, Tang A, Xu BY, Wang SY, Boland MV, Sun CQ, Baxter S, Stagg B, Hribar M, Chen A. Development and Evaluation of a Computable Phenotype for Normal Tension Glaucoma. Ophthalmol Sci. 2025 Jun 18;5(6):100858. doi: 10.1016/j.xops.2025.100858. eCollection 2025 Nov-Dec. PMID: 40727323 Free PMC article.

Gholami M, Wing D, Bedmutha MS, Godino J, Ibarra A, Fergerson B, May N, Longhurst CA, Weibel N, Duffy A, Rataj H, Singh K, Patrick K. A Human-Centered Approach for a Student Mental Health and Well-Being Mobile App: Protocol for Development, Implementation, and Evaluation. JMIR Res Protoc. 2025 Jul 18;14:e68368. doi: 10.2196/68368. PMID: 40681167

Dziegielewski C, Singh S. Guselkumab for Crohn's disease: the IL-23 blockade revolution. Lancet. 2025 Jul 17:S0140-6736(25)00874-8. doi: 10.1016/S0140-6736(25)00874-8. Online ahead of print. PMID: 40684777 No abstract available.

Gross BJ, Donahue A, Ford JS, Lu X, Boussina A, Malhotra A, Zheng K, Nemati S, Wardi G. Mortality and antibiotic timing in deep learning-derived surviving sepsis campaign risk groups: a multicenter study. Crit Care. 2025 Jul 14;29(1):302. doi: 10.1186/s13054-025-05493-6. PMID: 40660326 Free PMC article.

Zhang L, Jindal B, Alaa A, Weinreb R, Wilson D, Segal E, Zou J, Xie P. Generative AI enables medical image segmentation in ultra low-data regimes. Nat Commun. 2025 Jul 14;16(1):6486. doi: 10.1038/s41467-025-61754-6. PMID: 40659619 Free PMC article.

Broderick RC, Spurzem GJ, Jeffery Reeves J, Hollandsworth HM, Sandler BJ, Jacobsen GR, Longhurst CA, Horgan S. First use of augmented reality headset in minimally invasive general surgery: seeing is believing. Surg Endosc. 2025 Jul 10. doi: 10.1007/s00464-025-11985-x. Online ahead of print. PMID: 40640628

O'Daffer A, Liu W, Bloss CS. School-Based Online Surveillance of Youth: Systematic Search and Content Analysis of Surveillance Company Websites. J Med Internet Res. 2025 Jul 8;27:e71998. doi: 10.2196/71998. PMID: 40627544

Nanda M, Gabriel RA, Sakai T. Leveraging Large Language Models to Enhance Emotional Intelligence Training in Anesthesiology. Anesthesiology. 2025 Jul 8. doi: 10.1097/ALN.0000000000005533. Online ahead of print. PMID: 40626589

Smith DM, Rowland EF, Gianella S, Patel SP, Solso S, Dullano C, Deiss R, Wells D, Ignacio C, Caballero G, Porrachia M, Kieffer C, Chaillon A. HIV Integration into the PTEN Gene and Its Tumor Microenvironment Implications for Lung Cancer. Curr Oncol. 2025 Jul 4;32(7):389. doi: 10.3390/curroncol32070389. PMID: 40710199 Free PMC article.

Ssemaganda HC, Davis SE, Govindarajulu US, Koola JD, Mao J, Westerman DM, Perkins AM, Speroff T, Ramsay CR, Sedrakyan A, Ohno-Machado L, Matheny ME, Resnic FS. A Statistical Framework to Detect and Quantify Operator-Learning Curves in Medical Device Safety Evaluation. Med Devices (Auckl). 2025 Jul 2;18:361-375. doi: 10.2147/MDER.S520191. eCollection 2025. PMID: 40626234 Free PMC article.

Tully JL, Rao S, Straw I, Gabriel RA, Longhurst C, Savage S, Voelker GM, Dameff CJ. Patient Care Technology Disruptions Associated With the CrowdStrike Outage. JAMA Netw Open. 2025 Jul 1;8(7):e2530226. doi: 10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2025.30226. PMID: 40682764 Free PMC article.

Kim IM, Radgoudarzi N, Chen EM, Liu J, Moussa K, Shantha JG, Tsui E, Gore C, Baxter SL, Porco TC, Arnold BF, Sun CQ. Time to Progression to Proliferative Diabetic Retinopathy in Patients With Type 2 Diabetes. JAMA Netw Open. 2025 Jul 1;8(7):e2521150. doi:10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2025.21150.PMID: 40663347

Unsubscribe

This email was sent to m1triplett@ucsd.edu.

To continue receiving our emails, add us to your address book.

9500 Gilman Drive | La Jolla, CA 92093 US

Copyright 2024 UCSD DBMI. All rights reserved.