UF Health receives $3.6M AI grant

UF announced Thursday it has been awarded $3.6 million out of a $23.5 million multicenter grant for a four-year data-generation project that will build an infrastructure for artificial intelligence (AI) in critical care and advancing AI to improve patients’ ability to recover from life-threatening illnesses.

Funded by the National Institutes of Health’s Bridge to Artificial Intelligence, or Bridge2AI program, this project creates a network of university health systems that will support a comprehensive repository of data for AI research from more than 100,000 critically ill patients. The patients’ data will be made anonymous.

Although the project’s highlight will be the 100,000-patient data set, key aspects of the project include AI workforce training events, a set of standards for ethical use of AI in critical care, publicly available AI tutorials and guidelines for a collaborative approach to medical AI research.

A team of eight principal investigators, including three from UF — Drs. Azra Bihorac, Parisa Rashidi and Yulia Levites Strekalova — will lead the network of connected intensive care units.

UF Health will contribute to the data repository, along with other health systems that include Massachusetts General Hospital at Harvard; Emory University; Duke University; the University of California, Los Angeles; Nationwide Children’s Hospital; Columbia University and the Mayo Clinic.

“This project is a huge win for UF AI research and will put us on the map for biomedical AI,” said Bihorac, the senior associate dean for research affairs at the College of Medicine and co-director of UF’s Intelligent Critical Care Center, or IC3. “The success of our UF team builds on the investment of UF Health and the UF College of Medicine in the digitization of clinical infrastructure and the generation, integration and standardization of medical data for both clinical and research use.”

The program, called “A Patient-Focused Collaborative Hospital Repository Uniting Standards for Equitable AI,” or CHoRUS, is designed to expand and generate biomedical data to be used for monitoring, diagnosing and treating critically ill patients, as well as augmenting doctor’s rapid decision-making.