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The Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai has launched a new department dedicated to advancing artificial intelligence (AI) to transform healthcare. The Department of Artificial Intelligence and Human Health is the first department of its kind within a medical school in the United States.
The department’s aims to lead AI-driven transformation of healthcare through innovative research, applying that knowledge to treatment in hospital and clinical settings, and providing personalized care for each patient, thus expanding Mount Sinai’s impact on human health across the health system and around the world.
Thomas J Fuchs, Dean for Artificial Intelligence and Human Health, Co-Director of the Hasso Plattner Institute for Digital Health at Mount Sinai, and Professor of Computational Pathology and Computer Science in the Department of Pathology at Icahn Mount Sinai, said:
“Mount Sinai’s AI enterprise and its collective entities will be the connective fabric linking and integrating our work throughout the entire Health System, as we robustly collaborate with all our institutes, departments, and centers to provide phenomenal patient care.
“The overarching goal of the Department for AI and Human Health is to impact patients’ health with AI. We will accomplish this by building AI systems at scale from data representing Mount Sinai’s diverse patient population. These systems will work seamlessly across all hospitals and care units to support physicians, foster research, and most importantly help patients’ care and well-being.”
Dr Fuchs, who will lead the department, is a prominent scientist in the field of computational pathology, with significant experience in machine learning (ML) and AI in healthcare. He will guide the department in creating an “AI Fabric” that will integrate ML and AI-driven decision-making throughout the Mount Sinai health system’s eight hospitals. This effort will include creating a hub-and-satellite model to make new tools and techniques available to all Mount Sinai physicians, and building an infrastructure for high-performance computing and data access to improve diagnostic and treatment capabilities.
Eric J Nestler, Dean for Academic and Scientific Affairs, Nash Family Professor of Neuroscience, and Director of The Friedman Brain Institute at Mount Sinai, said:
“We are just at the beginning stages of reaping the advantages of artificial intelligence and machine learning in biomedical research and clinical medicine. Mount Sinai is at the forefront of this effort, underscored by the opening—expected toward the end of 2022—of a new research facility on campus that will house the new Department and related endeavors.”
The new department builds on Mount Sinai’s work across various forms of artificial intelligence, including machine learning to develop novel diagnostics and treatments for diseases. Earlier this year, Icahn Mount Sinai announced it will offer a new PhD concentration in Artificial Intelligence and Emerging Technologies in Medicine as part of its PhD in Biomedical Sciences program starting in the fall of 2022. The concentration will train future scientists in cutting-edge technologies, including AI, medical devices, robotic machines, and sensors. The Hasso Plattner Institute for Digital Health at Mount Sinai—a collaboration between the Hasso Plattner Institute for Digital Engineering in Potsdam, Germany, and the Mount Sinai Health System—formed in 2019 to expand capabilities and create new tools of data science, biomedical and digital engineering, machine learning, and AI, including wearable technology.
