In July 2018, Drs. Peter Chang and Daniel Chow founded the Center for Artificial Intelligence in Diagnostic Medicine (CAIDM) with the support of UCI’s School of Medicine and its Radiological Sciences Department. The vision has been to develop, validate, and deploy clinically relevant AI tools to improve health and well-being. Soon after CAIDM’s inception, Dr. Chang began to validate and implement tools to speed up critical diagnoses in the emergency department. Shortly after, Drs. Chang and Chow joined Drs. Suzanne Sandmeyer and Leslie Thompson to form the Precision Health through Artificial Intelligence through an Academic Initiative at UCI. A vital mission of the initiative is to focus on the clinical challenge and question and identifying beforehand how exciting technologies such as AI can provide next-level healthcare.
While the group has focused on new innovations in stroke, dementia, and cancer, the COVID-19 pandemic presented a new critical care need that required swift action. To date, COVID-19 has infected over 3.9 million Americans and claimed over 143,000 death. Recognizing the crisis, the AI group at UCI quickly pivoted to develop new data-driven tools to identify vulnerable patients. This work has been supported by an award from UCI’s COVID-19 Basic, Translational, and Clinical Research Funding Opportunity . In under 6-months, the groups’ work has already had an immediate impact on our healthcare system, community, and patients. First, the group quickly worked with hospital leadership and staff to standardize a COVID-19 severity lab panel to ensure that critical labs would be ordered consistently and have a downstream effect of providing high-quality datasets. Second, the team developed, validated, and deployed a data-driven decision support tool built on our institutions’ COVID-19 dataset, which provides a risk score for the likelihood of requiring critical care. This tool is among the first to be used in a live clinical setting and has helped UCI health clinicians triage patients with COVID-19. Also, the application is continually updated as UCI’s experience with COVID-19 increases. Third, the group has curated a rich database and has been able to provide insightful maps to demonstrate areas of risk in our communities, assisting the institution to optimize care.
COVID19 is not over, stressing the importance of (1) wearing a mask when out and (2) distancing physically when out socially. Our scientists, clinicians, and staff are focused on helping the community in this pandemic.
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