Abstract: In this presentation, Dr. Wu will showcase three digital health solutions developed at the Laboratory of Data Discovery for Health (D24H), a research center funded by the Hong Kong government to accelerate commercialization and translation of academic research. The first solution is an LLM-powered chatbot focused on HPV vaccines co-developed with Fudan University. A clustered randomized controlled trial (RCT) involving over 2,500 parents in mainland China showed that this chatbot increased HPV vaccine uptake among their school-aged daughters, particularly in rural locations with limited health literacy and less robust healthcare infrastructure (Nature Medicine 2025). The second solution is an AI-powered smartphone application designed to detect heart murmurs without the need for additional hardware. In a clinical validation study involving more than 500 patients at Queen Mary Hospital in Hong Kong, this app demonstrated an accuracy level comparable to that of commercial electronic stethoscopes. The third solution is an offline LLM application designed to support autonomous cancer staging and risk stratification for thyroid cancer cases using their clinical notes. Trained on pathology reports from The Cancer Genome Atlas - Thyroid Cancer (TCGA-THCA) database, this application achieved an accuracy of over 90% when tested on 289 TCGA-THCA notes and 35 pseudo-clinical cases composed by clinicians at Queen Mary Hospital (npj Digital Medicine 2025).
Bio: Professor Joseph Wu is a professor in the School of Public Health. He specialises in mathematical and statistical modelling of diseases. His research aim is to develop practical analytics and strategies for disease control and prevention. He has worked on COVID-19, seasonal and pandemic influenza, hand-foot-and-mouth diseases, HPV, MERS, yellow fever, cervical cancer, colorectal cancer and breast cancer. He earned his PhD in Operations Research and BS in Chemical Engineering from MIT. Professor Wu is the managing director of the Laboratory of Data Discovery for Health (D24H). His research programme in D24H aims to develop AI technology and tools for global and personal health protection, with a particular focus on clinical NLP, epidemic nowcasting/forecasting and vaccine hesitancy. He is also the director of HKU's first Massive Open Online Courseware (MOOC) Epidemics which has had more than 50,000 people enrolled since its first launch in 2014. He is the director of two Croucher Summer Courses (Vaccinology and Vaccine Hesitancy).
.png){kind=logo}
