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USC awarded the Viterbi School of Engineering $1 million dollars last week to help grow their AI-based health research program. The school’s Information Sciences Institute opened the Center on Artificial Intelligence Research for Health (AI4Health) in 2021, which works to improve healthcare, including through improvements in diagnosing process and disease prevention.
The investment comes in part from USC’s Frontiers of Computing initiative, which President Carol Folt helped launch in 2019. That initiative, which promises to provide a total of $1 billion dollars in the coming years, which will provide educational and research opportunities to engineering students in advanced technologies, such as AI.
The new award, dubbed AI4Health, is also supported through awards from the National Institute of Health (NIH) and the National Science Foundation (NSF), among other funding sources.
Yolanda Gil, a research professor at USC and a member of AI4health, is now the Senior Director for Artificial Intelligence and Data Science Initiatives at the institute. Gil wants AI4Health to bring together experts in AI with clinicians and healthcare professionals to deepen AI’s role in medicine.
“We’re doing research on a broad range of areas that affect our health beyond doctor visits — how to improve nutrition, exercise, and recovery; prevent stress; and help people follow treatments and take medication properly,” Gil said in a written statement on Viterbi’s website.
AI4Health is working with USC Keck, the Herman Ostrow School of Dentistry, the Alfred E. Mann School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences, the Norris Cancer Center and the Michelson Center for Convergent Bioscience. In addition to collaborating with other organizations in the healthcare system, AI4′s leadership aims to expand the evolving technology’s role in medicine, fighting health misinformation and making new discoveries that benefit patients.
AI4Health has been involved with AI detection of diseases, managing large health datasets, and finding patterns to predict conditions like Alzheimer’s, according to Viterbi’s site. Such work is paving the way for personalized treatments, better telehealth tools, and improved patient care, the site adds.
The $1 million investment is part of the program’s expansion. The institute was originally tasked with funding AI4Health’s creation, according to Craig Knoblock, Keston Director of Information Science Institute.
Knoblock explained how the $1 million will help fund fresh research from the get-go.
“You can’t go to a funding agency when you have an initial idea. Investors want preliminary data first,” Knoblock said. “This money will allow for more seed projects. With data from those, we will hopefully get funding for large projects that will collaborate with the greater health enterprise at USC.”
Knoblock also responded to concerns about ethics and equity with AI4Health’s technology.
“We have people looking to train our systems to make them fair,” he said. “We develop techniques for the needs of individual projects and have team members ready to apply these techniques.”
AI4Health seeks not only to collaborate with other health initiatives at USC, but to involve students in its research as well.
“We have around 90 PhD students working with AI4Health and around 75 Masters students,” Knoblock said. “When we begin new projects, we address the roles our students here can fill.”
Students also share excitement for the program, such as Hank Halverson, a sophomore studying human biology.
“If you had a well-trained AI, you could consult about your health programs. That could help you get diagnosed faster,” said Halverson. “Getting a doctor’s appointment can mean waiting months for something non-life-threatening.”
Despite potential benefits, there are plenty of concerns about AI.
“We all know AI is not always accurate,” said Halverson. “And healthcare is one of those fields where you can’t mess up. Any kind of misdiagnosis would be a huge lawsuit.”
Still, Gil is confident in the future of AI4Health.
“AI is ready to have a positive, profoundly transformative impact in the world and we can’t run away from that,” Gil said.