Researchers Awarded NIH Grant to Develop Rare Disease Prediction AI

Researchers from Penn Medicine and the University of Florida have been awarded a $4.7 million grant for a four-year project to develop an artificial intelligence (AI) system that can predict the occurrence of rare diseases from existing real-world data (RWD) sources like electronic health records (EHR). The first diseases to be examined in the projects are different subtypes of vasculitis and spondlyoarthritis.

According to Penn Medicine, “The researchers plan is to pull data through Patient-Centered Clinical Research Networks (PCORnet), a national database including information from different health systems, adding up to more than 27 million patients. De-identified data from these patients, including lab test results, comorbid conditions, past treatments, and other commonly available information, will be used to create the algorithms. Once built, the researchers will test each algorithm’s predictive power across 10-plus health systems, and then following these tests, the methods the team develops will be shared and available to apply to other diseases.”

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(Source: Penn Medicine, September 21^st, 2022)