Dr. Yikuan Li

Dr. Yikuan Li is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Health Administration and Policy. He earned his PhD in Health and Biomedical Informatics from the Feinberg School of Medicine at Northwestern University, where his thesis research on heart failure prediction was supported by the American Heart Association Predoctoral Fellowship. His research interests include leveraging multimodal machine learning to build clinical predictive models, applying large language models to advance health interoperability, and using reinforcement learning to optimize health policy and decision-making.

Dr. Li has published in leading informatics journals such as JAMIA, npj Digital Medicine, and NEJM AI, and has presented his work at venues including the AMIA Annual Symposium, the AHA Scientific Sessions, ICLR, and IJCAI. He is also the recipient of the AMIA LEAD Scholar award in 2025.
 

Research

Research Interests

• AI for Health
• Interoperability
• Large Language Models
• Multimodal Learning

Select Publications

• Li Y, Wang H, Yerebakan HZ, Shinagawa Y, Luo Y. FHIR-GPT Enhances Health Interoperability with Large Language Models. NEJM AI. 2024 Aug;1(8):10.1056/aics2300301. doi: 10.1056/aics2300301. Epub 2024 Jul 19. PMID: 40746832; PMCID: PMC12312630. https://ai.nejm.org/doi/10.1056/AIcs2300301
• Li Y, Wehbe RM, Ahmad FS, Wang H, Luo Y. A comparative study of pretrained language models for long clinical text. J Am Med Inform Assoc. 2023 Jan 18;30(2):340-347. doi: 10.1093/jamia/ocac225. PMID: 36451266; PMCID: PMC9846675. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36451266/
• Li Y, Wang H, Luo Y. Improving Fairness in the Prediction of Heart Failure Length of Stay and Mortality by Integrating Social Determinants of Health. Circ Heart Fail. 2022 Nov;15(11):e009473. doi: 10.1161/CIRCHEARTFAILURE.122.009473. Epub 2022 Nov 15. PMID: 36378761; PMCID: PMC9673161. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36378761/
• Li, Y., Wang, H., & Luo, Y. (2020, December 16–19). A comparison of pre-trained vision-and-language models for multimodal representation learning across medical images and reports. In T. Park et al. (Eds.), Proceedings of the 2020 IEEE International Conference on Bioinformatics and Biomedicine (BIBM) (pp. 1999–2004). IEEE. https://doi.org/10.1109/BIBM49941.2020.9313289
• Luo Y, Li Y, Ogunyemi O, Koski E, Himes BE. Leveraging large language models for academic conference organization. NPJ Digit Med. 2025 Feb 14;8(1):101. doi: 10.1038/s41746-025-01492-7. PMID: 39953127; PMCID: PMC11828976. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11828976/
• Kline A, Wang H, Li Y, Dennis S, Hutch M, Xu Z, Wang F, Cheng F, Luo Y. Multimodal machine learning in precision health: A scoping review. NPJ Digit Med. 2022 Nov 7;5(1):171. doi: 10.1038/s41746-022-00712-8. PMID: 36344814; PMCID: PMC9640667. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36344814/
• Wang H, Li Y, Hutch M, Naidech A, Luo Y. Using Tweets to Understand How COVID-19-Related Health Beliefs Are Affected in the Age of Social Media: Twitter Data Analysis Study. J Med Internet Res. 2021 Feb 22;23(2):e26302. doi: 10.2196/26302. PMID: 33529155; PMCID: PMC7901597. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33529155/
• Wang H, Li Y, Hutch MR, Kline AS, Otero S, Mithal LB, Miller ES, Naidech A, Luo Y. Patterns of diverse and changing sentiments towards COVID-19 vaccines: a sentiment analysis study integrating 11 million tweets and surveillance data across over 180 countries. J Am Med Inform Assoc. 2023 Apr 19;30(5):923-931. doi: 10.1093/jamia/ocad029. PMID: 36821435; PMCID: PMC10114113. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36821435/
• Wang H, Li Y, Khan SA, Luo Y. Prediction of breast cancer distant recurrence using natural language processing and knowledge-guided convolutional neural network. Artif Intell Med. 2020 Nov;110:101977. doi: 10.1016/j.artmed.2020.101977. Epub 2020 Nov 1. PMID: 33250149; PMCID: PMC7983067. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33250149/

Honors and Awards

Leadership and Education Award Donation (LEAD) Scholar, AMIA, 03/2025
Predoctoral Fellowship, American Heart Association, 01/2023

Affiliations

Member, American Medical Informatics Association
Member, American Heart Association

Degrees

• PhD, Health and Biomedical Informatics, Northwestern University
• BS, Information Engineering, Shanghai Jiao Tong University