Best Oral Presentation Award for Atallah Madi at ICAAI 2025
Congratulations to Atallah Madi, recipient of the Best Oral Presentation Award at the 9th International Conference on Advances in Artificial Intelligence (ICAAI 2025) in Manchester, UK.
Atallah’s research introduces a method to assist in the diagnostic process of Hirschsprung’s disease. Hirschsprung disease (HD) is a congenital birth disorder that causes colonic nerve cell deformation and intestinal blockage. It is characterized by the lack of colon ganglion cells in the myenteric plexus regions. The disease affects 1 in 5000 newborns globally and may be deadly if untreated. In this paper, a Vision–Language Model (VLM) is trained to classify plexus regions in Hirschsprung’s disease using both digital microscope histopathology images and medical knowledge. The text descriptions of the disease are generated using a Large Language Model (LLM) that is used as a reasoning model and is limited to a set of trusted medical literature. This allows the VLM to make predictions while being aligned to how pathologists examine and interpret tissue samples.