AHA, Duke Clinical Research Institute Team Up on AI, Precision Medicine Initiative

The American Heart Association (AHA) and the Duke Clinical Research Institute (DCRI) have announced a strategic alliance to target the prediction, prevention and treatment of cardiovascular diseases using artificial intelligence and big data.

The AHA’s Institute for Precision Cardiovascular Medicine and the DCRI’s data science team will develop and test machine learning methods on the AHA Precision Medicine Platform, which is powered by Amazon Web Services.

The strategic alliance will investigate how big data is managed, accessed, harmonized, searched and deposited, specific to secondary analyses of clinical databases. In addition, DCRI and AHA will leverage their grants for big data harmonization and methods to create novel machine learning tools and aggregated data repositories.

“There is great potential in machine learning and other artificial intelligence methods to discover new insights, but we have to be sensible and think clearly about how we use it,” said Michael Pencina, PhD, the DCRI’s director of biostatistics and a professor of biostatistics and bioinformatics at the Duke School of Medicine, in a prepared statement. “I think team science is the key that unlocks that potential.”