Publications by authors named "Kush Attal"

Objective: The central melanocortin system is essential for the regulation of food intake and body weight. Agouti-related protein (AgRP) is the sole orexigenic component of the central melanocortin system and is conserved across mammalian species. AgRP is currently known to be expressed exclusively in the mediobasal hypothalamus, and hypothalamic AgRP-expressing neurons are essential for feeding.

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This paper introduces a new challenge and datasets to foster research toward designing systems that can understand medical videos and provide visual answers to natural language questions. We believe medical videos may provide the best possible answers to many first aid, medical emergency, and medical education questions. Toward this, we created the MedVidCL and MedVidQA datasets and introduce the tasks of Medical Video Classification (MVC) and Medical Visual Answer Localization (MVAL), two tasks that focus on cross-modal (medical language and medical video) understanding.

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Though exponentially growing health-related literature has been made available to a broad audience online, the language of scientific articles can be difficult for the general public to understand. Therefore, adapting this expert-level language into plain language versions is necessary for the public to reliably comprehend the vast health-related literature. Deep Learning algorithms for automatic adaptation are a possible solution; however, gold standard datasets are needed for proper evaluation.

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Objective: Plain language in medicine has long been advocated as a way to improve patient understanding and engagement. As the field of Natural Language Processing has progressed, increasingly sophisticated methods have been explored for the automatic simplification of existing biomedical text for consumers. We survey the literature in this area with the goals of characterizing approaches and applications, summarizing existing resources, and identifying remaining challenges.

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Variants in the gene encoding ankyrin repeat and SOCS box-containing 4 () are linked to human obesity. Here, we characterized the pathways underlying the metabolic functions of ASB4. Hypothalamic expression was suppressed by fasting in wild-type mice but not in mice deficient in , which encodes Agouti-related protein (AgRP), an appetite-stimulating hormone, suggesting that ASB4 is a negative target of AgRP.

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