Dr. Matthias Becker – German Center for Neurodegenerative Diseases (DZNE)- Bonn, Germany
Bio: Matthias Becker is a researcher working at the intersection of computer science and medicine. After completing his studies in computer science at Leibniz University Hannover, Germany, he joined MIRALab, Switzerland, in 2012. There, he worked on medical image analysis in the scope of the EU project MultiScaleHuman under the supervision of Prof. Nadia Magnenat-Thalmann. After completing his PhD, he started a Postdoc at the LIMES Institute of the University of Bonn, Germany, where he used Memory-Driven Computing to efficiently process high-dimensional genomics data. Matthias now leads a group at the German Center for Neurodegenerative Diseases (DZNE) in Bonn Germany, where he focusses on applications of Generative AI in Alzheimer’s research.
THE PRESENTATION
Title: Collaboration in Alzheimer’s Research: From Synthetic Data to Swarm Learning
Abstract: Complex diseases patterns like in Alzheimer’s can only be detected in large data sets, often stemming from clinical studies across many centers worldwide. However, sharing these datasets is challenging due to patient privacy rights and laws like GDPR and HIPAA. To overcome this, we investigated multiple approaches: Synthetic cohorts use generative modelling to create shareable data sets which mimic the original distributions without exposing identifiable patient information. A complimentary approach is Swarm Learning (Nature, 2021), where a fully decentralized machine learning technique is used to train disease classifiers.