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 enhance clinical trials for cardiovascular disease, advance patient care and bring potential new treatments to heart disease patients more quickly.
WHY IT MATTERS
The affiliation between the two institutions aims to develop new strategies leveraging artificial intelligence to enhance the treatment of and prevent 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 that he believes the joint initiative will help create “a healthier world.”
As he explained: “Clinical cardiovascular diseases are areas of utmost priority and concern worldwide.”
In their memorandum of understanding, the institutions aim to launch international clinical trials involving AI and interventional cardiology, cardiac electrophysiology, heart failure, cardiac imaging and preventive cardiology.
Researchers from CIT will travel to Mount Sinai Heart in New York City to learn more about the latest advances in cardiovascular care and research, and Mount Sinai researchers will go to Chiba, Japan, to gain additional technological expertise.
Mount Sinai Heart ranks No. 1 in New York and No. 4 globally for the 2024 World’s Best Specialized Hospitals, according to Newsweek.
“We look forward to collaborating with our colleagues at CIT to advance the frontier of medical science,” added Dr. Dennis Charney, Anne and Joel Ehrenkranz Dean of Icahn Mount Sinai and president for academic affairs of the Mount Sinai Health System.
CIT, the oldest private technological university in Japan, is renowned for advancing innovation and a diverse research portfolio ranging from robotics to computer science. The university’s mission is a commitment to provide “cutting-edge technological solutions that cater to society’s evolving needs.”
CIT’s Center for Radical Transformation, founded in 2021, is also known as the Henkaku Center
for Radical Transformation. Joichi Ito, president of CIT, also leads the center and its Probabilistic Computing Project, which is developing neurosymbolic generative AI systems and supporting the development and use of InferenceQL, an open-source, SQL-like language for querying probabilistic programs modeling tabular data.
Neurosymbolic AI refers to AI systems that seek to integrate neural network-based methods with symbolic knowledge-based approaches, according to Amit Sheth, founding director of the Artificial Intelligence Institute at the University of South Carolina.
“Symbolic knowledge structures can provide an effective mechanism for imposing domain constraints for safety and explicit reasoning traces for explainability,” he wrote in the Neurosymbolic Artificial Intelligence (Why, What, and How), for the May/June issue of IEEE Intelligent Systems.
“These structures can create transparent and interpretable systems for end-users, leading to more trustworthy and dependable AI systems, especially in safety-critical applications,” Sheth said in a version of the article he posted to LinkedIn.
THE LARGER TREND
Ensuring good data science – including how to address the complexities of bias in healthcare AI – is a step-by-step process needed for developing trust in healthcare AI.
Most healthcare organizations are using analytics and experimenting with AI, but it’s often “off-the-shelf foundation models,” said Rich Birhanzel, Accenture’s healthcare lead.
“However, customizing foundation models will require access to domain-specific organizational data, semantics, knowledge and methodologies.”
To take on generative AI responsibly, healthcare organizations must not only get their proprietary data ready and establish the right controls, but they must refine processes to embrace generative AI capabilities and elevate the role of the human worker.
“The biggest value will come when organizations customize or fine-tune models using their own data, allowing them to address their unique needs,” he told Healthcare IT News in August.
ON THE RECORD
“We’re confident that combining our expertise in computer science with Icahn Mount Sinai’s remarkable work in medicine will result in pioneering advancements and tangible benefits for patients worldwide,” said Ito in Mount Sinai’s statement.
“Our partnership with the Chiba Institute of Technology presents an invaluable opportunity to harness the power of computational sciences, pushing the boundaries of what we can achieve,” added Bhatt.
Andrea Fox is senior editor of Healthcare IT News.
Email: afox@himss.org
Healthcare IT News is a HIMSS Media publication.
