Our civilization is undergoing a fundamental transformation that will directly affect every single human being. One does not have to follow Google’s chief executive officer declaring artificial intelligence (AI) to be “more profound than electricity or fire” but, without a doubt, the impact of AI could eclipse advances from the Industrial Revolution, personal computing, and the internet combined. Health care and well-being, as fundamental human needs, are at the forefront of this transformation.
Data
In health care, this transformation is driven by an annual growth rate of medical data that exceeds all other global data sources, including financial services, manufacturing, media, and entertainment. A single digitized microscopy slide, for example, with its millions of cells and morphological structures, contains more data than a full-feature high-definition movie. To that end, the advent of AI in health care is not only driven but made necessary by this explosion of data.
Through its scientific computing and data partners, Mount Sinai—both the Health System and Icahn Mount Sinai—has invested significantly in building a comprehensive infrastructure to accelerate research in all biomedical domains. The statistical methods used to analyze and model biological and health care data have evolved rapidly from classical linear models with a few parameters to early machine-learning models such as support vector machines and random forests that depended on manual feature engineering to state-of-the-art, high-capacity deep-learning approaches with billions of parameters. Examples in health care are convolutional neural networks for pathology, dermatology, radiology images, and drug discovery, and transformer models for medical language.
Research
Data alone does not improve the lives of our patients. At the Department of Artificial Intelligence and Human Health at Icahn Mount Sinai, we have the capacity to analyze these tremendous quantities of data. We envision an “intelligent fabric” that underpins all biomedicine and health care at Mount Sinai. This intelligent fabric will be woven out of AI services that elevate and streamline the work of our clinicians, scientists, and administrators. At the most basic level, we will continue to leverage our existing productivity and decision-support tools for diagnosis, treatment, and workflow optimization; at the same time, we will connect and interweave these tools to improve overall patient outcomes and optimize resources for the entire health system. Research analytics and mechanisms for multimodal data integration have not yet been built into the modern health care environment. As a result, even health systems that have invested heavily in data science infrastructure remain largely in the dark regarding workflows and outcomes within their walls. At Mount Sinai, the intelligent fabric will overcome this issue by providing insight into the whole system from intertwined AI threads.
Mount Sinai Health System Partners
The Department of Artificial Intelligence and Human Health supports AI initiatives within departments, institutes, and centers across Mount Sinai and provide an academic home for AI faculty. It also provide the AI-enabling hardware, software infrastructure, and expertise to continue the Mount Sinai Health System’s stronghold as a leader in providing patient care through pioneering innovations and technologies.
We are working with the following departments, institutes, and centers:
- The Center for Biostatistics
- The Department of Medicine
- The Department of Pathology
- The Department of Radiology
- The Department of Nephrology
- The Department of Genomics and Genetic Sciences
- Department of Neuroscience
- Scientific Computing and Data Science Partners
- Clinical Data Science
- The Tisch Cancer Institute
- The BioMedical Engineering and Imaging Institute (BMEII)
- The Hasso Plattner Institute for Digital Health at Mount Sinai (HPI-MS)
- The Charles Bronfman Institute for Personalized Medicine (IMP)
- The Mount Sinai Center for Bioinformatics
- The Mount Sinai Clinical Intelligence Center (MSCIC)
Clinical Translation
The Department of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Human Health at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai will enable us to gather greater quantities of data than ever before, including medical record information from over the past decades. Our supercomputer capabilities will enable us to analyze these data to better understand how to improve diagnosis, treatment, and workflow. These advances will enable us to create an “intelligent fabric” that will facilitate both emergency reactions and long-term strategic decisions. The intelligent fabric will also directly affect the health care journeys of our patients.
For patients, the intelligent fabric will extend beyond the improved care in the walls of the health care system: AI companions will guide them toward disease prevention and healthier living, resulting in enhanced well-being. Intelligent tools, together with physicians and staff, will chaperone patients to the right care at the right time and assist with rehabilitation after they return home. The intelligent fabric will envelop them with personalized services, giving them the reassuring feeling of being continuously cared for by Mount Sinai, and more important, the confidence that comes with knowing that they will receive personalized treatment and have an active role in the decision-making process.
Addressing Privacy Concerns
Building AI for patient care is a challenging task that comes with many additional responsibilities, ranging from complying with patient consent and guaranteeing privacy to data protection and cybersecurity. To support this effort, Mount Sinai has initiated a wide-ranging AI ethics initiative to ensure our development, evaluation, validation, and use of AI are ethical and make our AI algorithms for clinical care safe, effective, and equitable.