The Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai has signed a memorandum of understanding with the Chiba Institute of Technology to use artificial intelligence to improve clinical trials for cardiovascular disease, improve patient care and bring potential new treatments faster to patients with heart disease.
WHY IT’S IMPORTANT
The collaboration between the two institutions aims to develop new strategies that use artificial intelligence to improve the treatment and prevention of cardiovascular disease, a global health challenge, according to an announcement from Mount Sinai.
Dr. Deepak Bhatt, Director of Mount Sinai Heart and Dr. Valentin Fuster, professor of cardiovascular medicine at Icahn Mount Sinai, said he believes the joint initiative will help create “a healthier world.”
He stated: “Clinical cardiovascular diseases are areas of highest priority and concern worldwide.”
In their memorandum of understanding, the institutions want to launch international clinical trials in the areas of AI and interventional cardiology, cardiac electrophysiology, heart failure, cardiac imaging and preventive cardiology.
CIT researchers will travel to Mount Sinai Heart in New York City to learn about the latest advances in cardiovascular care and research, and Mount Sinai researchers will travel to Chiba, Japan, to gain additional technological expertise.
Accordingly, Mount Sinai Heart is ranked No. 1 in New York and No. 4 worldwide among the world’s best specialty hospitals in 2024 Newsweek.
“We look forward to collaborating with our colleagues at CIT to advance the frontiers of medical science,” added Dr. Dennis Charney, Anne and Joel Ehrenkranz, dean of Icahn Mount Sinai and president of academic affairs for Mount Sinai Health System.
CIT, Japan’s oldest private technology university, is known for fostering innovation and a diverse research portfolio ranging from robotics to computer science. The university’s mission is a commitment to “providing cutting-edge technological solutions that meet the changing needs of society.”
Founded in 2021, CIT’s Center for Radical Transformation is also known as the Henkaku Center
for radical transformation. Joichi Ito, President of CIT, also directs the center and its facilities Probabilistic computer projectwhich develops neurosymbolic generative AI systems and supports the development and use of InferenceQL, an open source SQL-like language for querying probabilistic programs to model tabular data.
According to Amit Sheth, founding director of the Artificial Intelligence Institute at the University of South Carolina, neurosymbolic AI refers to AI systems that attempt to integrate neural network-based methods with symbolic knowledge-based approaches.
“Symbolic knowledge structures can provide an effective mechanism for imposing domain constraints for security and explicit reasoning traces for explainability,” he wrote in Neurosymbolic Artificial Intelligence (Why, What, and How) for the May/June issue of Intelligent IEEE Systems.
“These structures can create transparent and interpretable systems for end users, resulting in more trustworthy and reliable AI systems, especially in safety-critical applications,” Sheth said in a version of the article He posted on LinkedIn.
THE BIGGER TREND
Ensuring good data science – including how to deal with the complexities of bias in healthcare AI – is a step-by-step process required to build trust in healthcare AI.
Most healthcare organizations are using analytics and experimenting with AI, but these are often “off-the-shelf, baseline models,” said Rich Birhanzel, head of healthcare at Accenture.
“However, adapting base models requires access to domain-specific organizational data, semantics, knowledge and methods.”
To responsibly approach generative AI, healthcare organizations must not only deploy their proprietary data and put the right controls in place, but they must also refine processes to leverage generative AI capabilities and empower the role of the human worker.
“The greatest value comes when companies adapt or refine models based on their own data, allowing them to address their individual needs,” he said Healthcare IT News in August.
ON THE RECORD
“We are confident that combining our expertise in informatics with Icahn Mount Sinai’s remarkable work in medicine will lead to groundbreaking advances and tangible benefits for patients worldwide,” Ito said in the Mount Sinai statement.
“Our partnership with Chiba Institute of Technology represents an invaluable opportunity to harness the power of computer science and push the boundaries of what we can achieve,” added Bhatt.
Andrea Fox is managing editor of Healthcare IT News.
Email: afox@himss.org
Healthcare IT News is a publication of HIMSS Media.