Blugold published in national journal, continues to improve patient care

One of the first projects he was assigned to recently celebrated a major milestone, as a peer-reviewed manuscript on Colon-Pilot, an artificial intelligence tool for automated colonoscopy surveillance, was accepted for publication in The American Journal of Gastroenterology. Mau’s name appears second on the author list alongside several respected physicians at Mayo Clinic, including Dr. Sushil Garg, chair of gastroenterology at Mayo Clinic Health System Eau Claire and physician-innovator focused on improving colonoscopy quality and colon cancer risk management.

“It was cool to see all the work we’ve put in be published and out there for people to see, Mau says. “It meant a lot to be able to come into this internship and earn the trust of a lot of these very well-known names.”

The article describes how the team developed and validated Colon-Pilot, a large language model-powered clinical decision support system. The system utilizes OpenAI’s GPT-4o to offer a scalable solution for improving both efficiency and quality in colorectal cancer prevention. Mau says the tool has completed clinical validation and while it has not yet been deployed to help patients, it is “heading in the right direction.”

The journal is published on behalf of the American College of Gastroenterology, which provides practical and professional support for clinicians dealing with the gastroenterological disorders seen most often in patients.

Mau had no knowledge of medical terminology prior to his internship but became more familiar within the first six months. This was the first time the Kimberly native had written code in the healthcare industry, but he impressed his colleagues and mentors with his engineering skills and ability to be proactive and innovative.

“His contributions were on par with a senior level AI engineer at our organization at the time,” says Sarah Harper, another co-author who served as Mau’s direct supervisor as manager of AI and Automation at Mayo Clinic Health System. “There's not many engineers I've met that have that translational skill set where they can speak coder language and then also understand the clinical setting and translate into plain language what they're doing and how it's helping to solve the problem that's been identified.”

“Dr. Garg works really quickly, he’s very effective with results and Brayden has been able to keep up with that, which is pretty awesome,” says Dr. Rahul Gomes, associate professor and interim chair of the computer science department at UW-Eau Claire, who served as Mau’s faculty advisor and a co-author of the article. “That’s why we were able to have this paper out in such short time.”

Other projects Mau is involved in are progressing toward publication. His paper on the approach used in the first phase of the Colon-Pilot project, known as knowledge distillation, is being submitted to Mayo Clinic Proceedings, a peer-reviewed medical journal sponsored by Mayo Clinic and authored by physicians worldwide.

Mau worked with Dr. David Blair, Mayo Clinic’s regional division chair for family medicine in northwest Wisconsin, to develop a large language model that reformats patient education information into a version that is personalized to individual patient needs. The paper they collaborated on is being reviewed by Applied Clinical Informatics, a journal serving health informatics and health information technology practitioners and executives.

He has also worked with Dr. Indrani Sen, a vascular and endovascular surgeon at Mayo Clinic in Eau Claire and La Crosse, to use natural language processing and machine learning to improve detection of abdominal aortic aneurisms in a clinical setting.

“I think (Brayden) is your ideal job candidate,” Harper says. “He understands in the context of the problem the team is trying to solve, and he understands where his gifts can be most helpful.”

In addition to juggling projects, Mau has been training the next interns who will continue the work once his internship ends in early May. Mau, having found a passion for healthcare, hopes his work leads to a permanent role on the team at Mayo Clinic.

“I really love the fact you can see what you’re doing every day, helping patients and clinicians,” Mau says. “It’s a lot more fulfilling when you can see the benefits more clearly because you’re helping people every single day with what you do.”