Madeleine Torcasso (UChicago): Schmidt AI in Science Speaker Series

Organized by the University of Chicago’s Eric and Wendy Schmidt AI in Science Fellowship Program.

Agenda
4:00pm – 4:45pm:  Presentation
4:45pm – 5:00pm:  Q&A
5:00pm – 5:30pm: Reception

Meeting location
William Eckhardt Research Center. Room 401
5640 S Ellis Avenue, Chicago, IL 60637
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Title: Pathology foundation models for informing image-based bioinformatics

Abstract: Abstract: Pathology foundation models (PFMs) have emerged as powerful tools for extracting salient information for clinical histopathology images, enabling unprecedented performance in downstream clinical tasks such as diagnosis, therapeutic response prediction, and genomic inference. However, the features learned by PFMs are often abstract and difficult to interpret biologically, limiting their utility for discovery and mechanistic insight. High-plex imaging approaches, such as CODEX, directly measure dozens of very specific protein markers at single-cell resolution. While highly informative, these high-plex platforms are expensive, time-consuming, and computationally intensive to analyze, making them difficult to scale. I will discuss the integration of PFMs with CODEX imaging in kidney transplant rejection to bridge scalable representation learning with biologically-grounded interpretation.

Bio: Madeleine Torcasso is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Medicine at the University of Chicago. She specializes in quantitative image analysis of biomedical microscopy images, including conventional computer vision and artificial intelligence-based methods. Madeleine was previously an Eric and Wendy Schmidt AI in Science Fellow at UChicago working under the supervision of Dr. Maryellen Giger and Dr. Marcus Clark at the intersection of imaging -omics and immunology. In 2018, she received her PhD in Biomedical Engineering from Texas A&M University, where she focused on radiative transport modeling for the design of in vivo optical systems. Prior to that, she received her bachelor’s degree from Vanderbilt University, also in Biomedical Engineering.