UF part of team awarded $23.5M grant to build AI infrastructure
By Cody Hawley
The University of Florida has been awarded $3.6 million of a $23.5 million multicenter grant for a four year data-generation project that is unprecedented in its scope, aimed at building an infrastructure for artificial intelligence in critical care and advancing AI in ways that 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 — Azra Bihorac, M.D., M.S., FCCM, FASN; Parisa Rashidi, Ph.D.; and Yulia Levites Strekalova, Ph.D.,
M.B.A. — will lead the network of connected intensive care units. UF Health will be a vital contributor to the data repository, along with other major health systems, including 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, will expand and generate biomedical data
that can be used for monitoring, diagnosing and treating critically ill patients, as well as augmenting doctors’ rapid decision-making.
