Lewis James Frey PhD

Dr. Lewis James Frey was awarded his MS and Ph.D. in Computer Sciences from the Vanderbilt University School of Engineering in Nashville, TN, and received further postdoctoral training in Biomedical Informatics through the National Library of Medicine and the Department of Biomedical Informatics at Vanderbilt University. Following previous appointments in the Department of Biomedical Informatics and at the Huntsman Cancer Institute at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, UT, he joined the Department of Public Health Sciences and the Hollings Cancer Center at MUSC.

The focus of Dr. Frey’s research is the application of Artificial Intelligence (AI) approaches to accelerate knowledge discovery through the application of innovative, distributed, and scalable approaches that expand our understanding of health and healthcare. In these efforts, he works with teams of clinical experts and physicians treating patients to bridge the gap between the development of AI approaches and their application in clinical settings.

Using the Veterans Informatics and Computing Infrastructure (VINCI), he applies AI methodology to develop predictive models of progression to cirrhosis, hepatocellular carcinoma, and mortality for patients with nonalcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD). These efforts include the use of novel machine learning analysis techniques applying data integration techniques to organize cancers in terms of correlations between causal germline and somatic tumor mutations and the association of outcomes with characterizations of medical phenotypes and their interacting gene and protein pathways.

He also works on the application of Natural Language Processing (NLP) applied to large repositories of medical data for knowledge discovery. AI methodology such as NLP and deep learning are key components used in the identification of factors such as social determinants of health that impact clinical outcomes.