SearcharxivSearch

arXiv subjects

Yusi Wei

Publications and source records attributed to Yusi Wei.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

Sparse Multi-Stage Expert-Agent Routing for Complex Clinical Reasoning

Complex clinical reasoning requires models to update diagnostic hypotheses as new evidence emerges and to coordinate different medical specialities under limited consultation resources. Existing LLM-based clinical reasoning systems typically perform single-pass prediction or rely on fixed multi-agent workflows, making expert participation either static or unnecessarily exhaustive. We propose Sparse Multi-Stage Expert-Agent Routing, a language-based clinical reasoning framework that models diagnosis as a stage-wise routing process. Given progressively available clinical evidence derived from multiple modalities, the framework maintains an evolving case state and adaptively activates a sparse set of medical expert agents, supported by expert-specific memory across stages. To evaluate free-text diagnostic conclusions beyond surface similarity, we further introduce ClinFEScore, a fact-aware semantic evaluation protocol for clinical reasoning outputs. On reconstructed multi-stage cases from MAC and AgentClinic-NEJM, our framework reduces the average number of activated experts from 17.0 to 3.0 whilst maintaining strong fact-level diagnostic quality. On 200 real-world hospital MDT cases, ClinFEScore correlates strongly with clinician judgements (Spearman's $\rho=0.81$; Pearson's $r=0.87$), whilst our method achieves 91.5\% clinician-verified diagnostic accuracy with approximately five expert-agent/LLM calls per case. These results support sparse stage-wise coordination as an efficient and clinically relevant approach to LLM-based clinical reasoning.

cs.CV

An Analytical Approach to Privacy and Performance Trade-Offs in Healthcare Data Sharing

The secondary use of healthcare data is vital for research and clinical innovation, but it raises concerns about patient privacy. This study investigates how to balance privacy preservation and data utility in healthcare data sharing, considering the perspectives of both data providers and data users. Using a dataset of adult patients hospitalized between 2013 and 2015, we predict whether sepsis was present at admission or developed during the hospital stay. We identify sub-populations, such as older adults, frequently hospitalized patients, and racial minorities, that are especially vulnerable to privacy attacks due to their unique combinations of demographic and healthcare utilization attributes. These groups are also critical for machine learning (ML) model performance. We evaluate three anonymization methods-$k$-anonymity, the technique by Zheng et al., and the MO-OBAM model-based on their ability to reduce re-identification risk while maintaining ML utility. Results show that $k$-anonymity offers limited protection. The methods of Zheng et al. and MO-OBAM provide stronger privacy safeguards, with MO-OBAM yielding the best utility outcomes: only a 2% change in precision and recall compared to the original dataset. This work provides actionable insights for healthcare organizations on how to share data responsibly. It highlights the need for anonymization methods that protect vulnerable populations without sacrificing the performance of data-driven models.

stat.AP

Multi-Objective Optimization-Based Anonymization of Structured Data for Machine Learning Application

Organizations are collecting vast amounts of data, but they often lack the capabilities needed to fully extract insights. As a result, they increasingly share data with external experts, such as analysts or researchers, to gain value from it. However, this practice introduces significant privacy risks. Various techniques have been proposed to address privacy concerns in data sharing. However, these methods often degrade data utility, impacting the performance of machine learning (ML) models. Our research identifies key limitations in existing optimization models for privacy preservation, particularly in handling categorical variables, and evaluating effectiveness across diverse datasets. We propose a novel multi-objective optimization model that simultaneously minimizes information loss and maximizes protection against attacks. This model is empirically validated using diverse datasets and compared with two existing algorithms. We assess information loss, the number of individuals subject to linkage or homogeneity attacks, and ML performance after anonymization. The results indicate that our model achieves lower information loss and more effectively mitigates the risk of attacks, reducing the number of individuals susceptible to these attacks compared to alternative algorithms in some cases. Additionally, our model maintains comparable ML performance relative to the original data or data anonymized by other methods. Our findings highlight significant improvements in privacy protection and ML model performance, offering a comprehensive and extensible framework for balancing privacy and utility in data sharing.

cs.LG