The Los Angeles health system has launched an Artificial Intelligence in Medicine (AIM) division and published studies highlighting how AI can be used to help care providers diagnose and improve care outcomes.
Cedars-Sinai Medical Center has launched a new division to explore than value of AI in clinical care.
The Los Angeles-based health system, long known for its innovative work with virtual reality, is developing the Artificial Intelligence in Medicine (AIM) division with an eye toward using machine learning technology to support care providers. The unit will be led by Sumeet Chugh, MD, an associate director of the Smidt Heart Institute.
"Through the use of applied artificial intelligence, we can solve existing gaps in mechanisms, diagnostics and therapeutics of major human disease conditions which afflict large populations," the program’s creator, Paul Noble, MD, a professor of medicine and chair of the Department of Medicine, said in a press release. "The future of medicine lies in decoding enormous amounts of phenotypic and genotypic patient data."
"Using a disease-based approach, AIM will enable cross-disciplinary connections between clinicians, scientists, and trainees at Cedars-Sinai at multiple levels," added Chugh, the Pauline and Harold Price Chair in Cardiac Electrophysiology Research and an expert in sudden cardiac arrest. "We hope to function as innovators and custodians of patients’ healthcare interests and needs. And, most important, we are bringing discoveries directly to patient care."
The new division has hit the ground running. AIM recently published a study in the Journal of Nuclear Medicine that analyzed how AI can be used to identify heart attack risk in patients with a history of coronary artery disease.
"Because the actual risk for recurring heart attacks differs greatly among patients, predicting future risk in patients with existing coronary artery disease can be challenging," Piotr Slomka, PhD, a professor of medicine in the Division of Artificial Intelligence in Medicine and lead author of the study, said in the press release. "Predicting risk, however, becomes easier and more efficient with the use of artificial intelligence."
In addition, research by AIM was recently published in JAMA Cardiology that evaluated a new AI tool that’s designed to identify hypertrophic cardiomyopathy and cardiac amyloidosis – and to help clinicians determine one from the other.
"These two heart conditions are challenging for even expert cardiologists to accurately identify, and so patients often go on for years to decades before receiving a correct diagnosis," Da Ouyang, MD, a cardiologist in the Smidt Heart Institute, member of the division of AIM and senior author of the study, said in the press release. "Our AI algorithm can pinpoint disease patterns that can’t be seen by the naked eye, and then use these patterns to predict the right diagnosis."
Eric Wicklund is the associate content manager and senior editor for Innovation at HealthLeaders.