UTSW, other leading medical centers create AI consortium

Newswise — DALLAS – March 20, 2024 – UT Southwestern Medical Center has joined more than a dozen leading medical centers and Microsoft to form the Trustworthy & Responsible AI Network (TRAIN), a national group designed to set standards and safely explore applications of artificial intelligence (AI) in health care.

“Advancing AI in health care will be well served through a collective initiative such as this one that will allow us to responsibly harness AI potential for the betterment of patient care and outcomes,” said Eric Peterson, M.D., M.P.H., Professor of Internal Medicine, Vice Provost, and Senior Associate Dean for Clinical Research at UT Southwestern. “We look forward to our role in guiding medicine into an exciting new era of discovery.”

AI holds the potential to transform the health care industry by improving care, increasing efficiency and productivity, and reducing costs. For example, the technology can be used to help screen patients, develop new treatments and drugs, and enhance public health.  

Through the consortium, TRAIN will advance quality and trustworthiness in AI by:

• Sharing best practices, including the safety, reliability, and monitoring of AI algorithms, and the skills required to manage AI responsibly. Data and AI algorithms will not be shared among member organizations or with third parties.
• Enabling registration of AI used for clinical care or clinical operations through a secure online portal.
• Providing tools to allow measurement of outcomes associated with the implementation of AI. These tools include best practices for studying the efficacy and value of AI methods and leveraging of privacy-preserving environments. Tools that allow for analyses in subpopulations to assess bias will also be provided.
• Facilitating the development of a federated national AI outcomes registry that will capture real-world data related to efficacy, safety, and optimization of AI algorithms.

Other members of the consortium include AdventHealth, Advocate Health, Boston Children’s Hospital, Cleveland Clinic, Duke Health, Johns Hopkins Medicine, Mass General Brigham, MedStar Health, Mercy, Mount Sinai Health System, Northwestern Medicine, Providence, Sharp HealthCare, University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health, and Vanderbilt University Medical Center.

Across UT Southwestern, researchers are utilizing artificial intelligence to untangle complex biological processes and improve patient care. Examples include the development of a deep learning system to predict which melanoma cell lines will metastasize and the deployment of an AI-powered location system to track equipment and improve efficiency in the Radiation Oncology facilities. 

“We believe that participating in TRAIN allows our research community to collaborate with others around the country to shape the future of artificial intelligence in health care and advance UT Southwestern’s mission of promoting discovery and fulfilling unmet medical needs,” Dr. Peterson said.

Dr. Peterson holds the Adelyn and Edmund M. Hoffman Distinguished Chair in Medical Science. 

About UT Southwestern Medical Center  

UT Southwestern, one of the nation’s premier academic medical centers, integrates pioneering biomedical research with exceptional clinical care and education. The institution’s faculty members have received six Nobel Prizes and include 25 members of the National Academy of Sciences, 21 members of the National Academy of Medicine, and 13 Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigators. The full-time faculty of more than 3,100 is responsible for groundbreaking medical advances and is committed to translating science-driven research quickly to new clinical treatments. UT Southwestern physicians provide care in more than 80 specialties to more than 120,000 hospitalized patients, more than 360,000 emergency room cases, and oversee nearly 5 million outpatient visits a year.