Cleveland Clinic Launches Artificial Intelligence Center

Cleveland Clinic has launched a new Center for Clinical Artificial Intelligence (AI) whose aim is to grow collaboration and communication between physicians, researchers and data-scientists.

The center, which was launched by the Cleveland Clinic Enterprise Analytics, is also expected to offer programmatic and technology support for AI initiatives at the Clinic and conduct research in several areas of medicine.

How the center will operate

According to Crain’s Business Cleveland, the Center for Clinical Artificial Intelligence will focus on developing innovative clinical applications of AI and leveraging machine-learning technology in hopes of improving health care delivery in areas such as diagnostics, disease prediction and treatment planning.

The center is also to work on overcoming the challenges of precision medicine that will help improve cancer detection through AI-driven imaging analytics and the prediction of patient responses to therapies using machine learning algorithms.

Cleveland Clinic said its researchers were building machine-learning models for several projects using AI technologies in diagnostics, prognosis, treatment decision-making, and patient outcomes. It was reported that these include building models to identify patients with a high risk of death during admission and to predict inpatient length of stay and readmission risk with a higher degree of accuracy than existing models.

Cleveland Clinic hopes that the center will facilitate collaboration among physicians, researchers, computer scientists and statisticians from across the United States and around the world, as well as between academia and industry, to advance the application of AI in healthcare, it was reported.

Aziz Nazha, director of the new center and associate medical director for AI, explained that Cleveland Clinic had set up the “Center for Clinical Artificial Intelligence to translate AI-based concepts into clinical tools that will improve patient care and advance medical research.”

The center is expected to bring together specialists from various departments such as genetics, IT, laboratory, pathology and radiology in developing clinical AI applications that are focused on cancer and to provide a personalized prediction of outcomes.

A leader in healthcare innovations

The latest development could be an indicator of Cleveland Clinic’s commitment to introducing AI to help improve clinical outcomes. Recently, the clinic announced the setting up of BrainX, which is angling to win the $5 million IBM Watson XPRIZE, a competition in which teams from all over the world are charged with accelerating the adoption of AI technologies in any industry.

Cleveland Clinic further said that out of 683 teams, its BrainX has advanced to the second round, where they are the only team out of 59 focused on healthcare.

Coupled with that, Cleveland Clinic was recently named one of the five most innovative hospitals.

AI is increasingly making its way into the health sector, where providers say they are already seeing streamlined processes and reduced costs, and patients are receiving more personalized attention and on-demand care.

Hospital systems look to big data and AI for solutions

In launching the Center for Clinical Artificial Intelligence, Cleveland Clinic joins the University of California, Irvine and UCI Health System, who set up the UCI Center for Artificial Intelligence in Diagnostic Medicine in July 2018. The center seeks to advance patient care, improve health outcomes and lower costs by leveraging machine learning technology in all areas of healthcare.

According to a press release at the time, the Center for Artificial Intelligence in Diagnostic Medicine is meant to provide a central research core that enables all UCI faculty, physicians and researchers, to collaborate on translating AI-based concepts into clinical tools to improve individual and population health.

In November last year, Duke University’s Pratt School of Engineering announced it was launching the Sherry and John Woo Center for Big Data and Precision Health to “harness the power of big data to improve health care on a global scale.” The center received $3 million in funding over the next three years from philanthropist, John Woo.

The New Jersey Hospital Association, in September last year announced that it was setting up a new data and informatics center, which was charged with tapping data to better understand some of the state’s most pressing health challenges and the economics of healthcare. The Center for Health Analytics, Research and Transformation (CHART) is expected to use information from a number of sources and apply analytics and predictive modeling to identify and better understand underlying problems and to work with its members, policy experts and others to explore solutions.

Interested in artificial intelligence in healthcare? Check out our article on ‘Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare: the future is amazing‘