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Cyril Zakka, MD

Hey! I'm a medical doctor by training and postdoctoral fellow in the HiesingerLab in the Department of Cardiothoracic Surgery at Stanford University.

My research interests primarily involve building and deploying large self-supervised multimodal networks for medical imaging and autonomous robotic surgery.

Projects

Research

CV/NLP

Med-Flamingo: A Multimodal Few Shot Learner

Medicine, by its nature, is a multifaceted domain that requires the synthesis of information across various modalities. Medical generative vision-language models (VLMs) make a first step in this direction and promise many exciting clinical applications. We propose Med-Flamingo, a multimodal few-shot learner adapted to the medical domain. Based on OpenFlamingo-9B, we continue pre-training on paired and interleaved medical image-text data from publications and textbooks. Med-Flamingo unlocks few-shot generative medical visual question answering (VQA) abilities, which we evaluate on several datasets including a novel challenging open-ended VQA dataset of visual USMLE-style problems.

NLP

Almanac: Knowledge-Grounded Language Models for Clinical Medicine

Large-language models have recently demonstrated impressive zero-shot capabilities in a variety of natural language tasks such as summarization, dialogue generation, and question-answering. Despite many promising applications in clinical medicine (e.g. medical record documentation, treatment guideline-lookup), adoption of these models in real-world settings has been largely limited by their tendency to generate factually incorrect and sometimes even toxic statements. In this paper we explore the ability of large-language models to facilitate and streamline medical guidelines and recommendation referencing: by enabling these model to access external point-of-care tools in response to physician queries, we demonstrate significantly improved factual grounding, helpfulness, and safety in a variety of clinical scenarios.

CV

MammoGANesis: Controlled Generation of High-Resolution Mammograms for Radiology Education

During their formative years, radiology trainees are required to interpret hundreds of mammograms per month, with the objective of becoming apt at discerning the subtle patterns differentiating benign from malignant lesions. Unfortunately, medico-legal and technical hurdles make it difficult to access and query medical images for training. In this paper we train a generative adversarial network (GAN) to synthesize 512 x 512 high-resolution mammograms. The resulting model leads to the unsupervised separation of high-level features (e.g. the standard mammography views and the nature of the breast lesions), with stochastic variation in the generated images (e.g. breast adipose tissue, calcification), enabling user-controlled global and local attribute-editing of the synthesized images. We demonstrate the model's ability to generate anatomically and medically relevant mammograms by achieving an average AUC of 0.54 in a double-blind study on four expert mammography radiologists to distinguish between generated and real images, ascribing to the high visual quality of the synthesized and edited mammograms, and to their potential use in advancing and facilitating medical education.