Research

My research develops reliable and deployable AI systems for healthcare, organized around three themes. Each theme lists the projects I have led or contributed to; the full list is on the Publications page.

Uncertainty Quantification & Trustworthy AI
Multimodal Mobile Sensing & Wearables
EHR & Clinical Data: Prediction and Patient Phenotyping

Uncertainty Quantification & Trustworthy AI

Methods that let clinical models recognize when they may be wrong — from modality-specific uncertainty in multimodal fusion to uncertainty–risk alignment in language models — so predictions can be trusted, or deferred to clinicians, appropriately.

Incorporating Uncertainty in Predictive Models Using Mobile Sensing and Clinical Data: A Case Study on Persistent Post-surgical Pain

Ziqi Xu, Jingwen Zhang, Simon Haroutounian, Hanyang Liu, Zihan Cao, Gabrielle Rose Messner, Harutyun B. Alaverdyan, Saivee Ahuja, Rahul Koshy, Joel Hanns, Madelyn Frumkin, Thomas L. Rodebaugh, Chenyang Lu

Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies (IMWUT), Vol. 9, No. 2, Article 58, June 2025 (33 pages)

Presented at ACM UbiComp / ISWC 2025 (Helsinki, Finland).

ABS DOI PDF BIB

CURA: Clinical Uncertainty Risk Alignment for Language Model–Based Risk Prediction

Sizhe Wang, Ziqi Xu, Claire Najjuuko, Yuyang Wu, C. Alba, Chenyang Lu

Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2026), Main Conference.

ABS DOI PDF BIB

Multimodal Mobile Sensing & Wearables

Predictive models that fuse wearable signals, ecological momentary assessments, and clinical data to forecast multi-dimensional recovery and pain outcomes for surgical patients.

Predicting Multi-dimensional Surgical Outcomes with Multi-modal Mobile Sensing: A Case Study with Patients Undergoing Lumbar Spine Surgery

Ziqi Xu, Jingwen Zhang, Jacob Greenberg, Madelyn Frumkin, Saad Javeed, Justin K. Zhang, Braeden Benedict, Kathleen Botterbush, Thomas L. Rodebaugh, Wilson Z. Ray, Chenyang Lu

Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies (IMWUT), Vol. 8, No. 2, Article 81, June 2024 (30 pages)

Presented at ACM UbiComp / ISWC 2024 (Melbourne, Australia).

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Real-Time Symptom and Wearable Monitoring May Improve Prediction of Postoperative Recovery in Lumbar Spine Surgery Beyond Standard Measures

Salim Yakdan*, Ziqi Xu* (equal contribution), Jingwen Zhang, Faraz Arkam, Thomas L. Rodebaugh, Burel R. Goodin, Brian J. Neuman, Michael P. Steinmetz, Michael P. Kelly, Shay Bess, Jang Yoon, Wilson Z. Ray, Chenyang Lu, Madelyn R. Frumkin, Jacob K. Greenberg

Neurosurgery, 2026.

DOI BIB

Preoperative Mobile Health Data Improve Predictions of Recovery From Lumbar Spine Surgery

Jacob K. Greenberg*, Madelyn Frumkin*, Ziqi Xu* (equal contribution), Jingwen Zhang, Saad Javeed, Justin K. Zhang, Braeden Benedict, Kathleen Botterbush, Salim Yakdan, Camilo A. Molina, Brenton H. Pennicooke, Daniel Hafez, John I. Ogunlade, Nicholas Pallotta, Munish C. Gupta, Jacob M. Buchowski, Brian Neuman, Michael Steinmetz, Zoher Ghogawala, Michael P. Kelly, Burel R. Goodin, Jay F. Piccirillo, Thomas L. Rodebaugh, Chenyang Lu, Wilson Z. Ray

Neurosurgery 95(3):617–626, September 2024.

ABS DOI BIB

Addressing Cohort Variability with Adaptive Fusion of Wearable and Clinical Data: A Case Study in Predicting Pancreatic Surgery Outcomes

Jingwen Zhang, R. Wang, Ziqi Xu, Hanyang Liu, J. Rodriguez, H. Cos, R. Srivastava, L. Raper, Dominic Sanford, C. Hammill, Chenyang Lu

ACM Transactions on Computing for Healthcare, Vol. 7, No. 2, pp. 1–27, 2026.

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Rethinking Measurement of Movement-Evoked Pain with Digital Technology

Madelyn R. Frumkin, Jingwen Zhang, Ziqi Xu, Salim Yakdan, Braeden Benedict, Saad Javeed, Justin K. Zhang, Kathleen Botterbush, Burel R. Goodin, Chenyang Lu, Wilson Z. Ray, Jacob K. Greenberg

The Journal of Pain, 105643, 2025.

DOI BIB

Protocol for Personalised Prediction of Persistent Postsurgical Pain

K. J. Holzer, Harutyun B. Alaverdyan, Ziqi Xu, Madelyn R. Frumkin, K. A. Frey, S. H. Gregory, Thomas L. Rodebaugh, Chenyang Lu, C. R. King, D. Head, Thomas Kannampallil, Simon Haroutounian

BMJ Open, Vol. 16, No. 2, e107055, 2026.

DOI BIB

EHR & Clinical Data: Prediction and Patient Phenotyping

Machine learning on structured EHR, survey, and population health data to discover patient subgroups through clustering and phenotyping, predict clinical risk, and support treatment decisions.

Using Artificial Intelligence to Identify Three Presenting Phenotypes of Chiari Type-1 Malformation and Syringomyelia

Vivek Prakash Gupta*, Ziqi Xu* (equal contribution), Jacob K. Greenberg, Jennifer Mae Strahle, Gabriel Haller, Thanda Meehan, Ashley Roberts, David D. Limbrick Jr., Chenyang Lu

Neurosurgery 96(6):1341–1352, June 2025.

ABS DOI BIB

Patterns of maternal and child health services utilization and associated socioeconomic disparities in sub-Saharan Africa

Claire Najjuuko, Ziqi Xu, Samuel Kizito, Chenyang Lu, Fred M. Ssewamala

Nature Communications vol. 16, Article 7840 (2025). Published 22 August 2025.

ABS DOI PDF BIB

Using Machine Learning to Predict Poor Adherence to Antiretroviral Therapy Among Adolescents Living with HIV in Low-Resource Settings

Claire Najjuuko, R. Brathwaite, Ziqi Xu, Samuel Kizito, Chenyang Lu, Fred M. Ssewamala

AIDS 39(9):1204–1213, 2025.

DOI BIB

Utilizing Semantic Textual Similarity for Clinical Survey Data Feature Selection

Benjamin C. Warner, Ziqi Xu, Simon Haroutounian, Thomas Kannampallil, Chenyang Lu

Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025, pages 502–520, Vienna, Austria, July 2025.

Presented at ACL 2025 (Vienna, Austria).

ABS DOI PDF BIB

Assisting Clinical Decisions for Scarcely Available Treatment via Disentangled Latent Representation

Bing Xue, A. S. Said, Ziqi Xu, Hanyang Liu, N. Shah, H. Yang, P. Payne, Chenyang Lu

Proceedings of the 29th ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD 2023).

ABS DOI BIB

Validation of Extracorporeal Membrane Oxygenation Mortality Prediction and Severity of Illness Scores in an International COVID-19 Cohort

N. Shah, Bing Xue, Ziqi Xu, H. Yang, E. Marwali, H. Dalton, P. Payne, Chenyang Lu, A. S. Said, ISARIC Clinical Characterisation Group

Artificial Organs 47(9):1490–1502, 2023.