UMass Chan Medical School and MITRE, operator of federally funded analysis and growth facilities, announced the establishment of the Health AI Assurance Laboratory, a collaborative initiative to advance well being synthetic intelligence within the public curiosity. The initiative is on the forefront of efforts within the United States, and the primary in Massachusetts, to make sure AI expertise in well being care is secure and efficient for everybody utilizing it.  

The announcement befell April 10 at UMass Chan in Worcester, at which Yvonne Hao, Massachusetts secretary of financial growth, offered an award for $555,000 from the Innovation Institute on the Massachusetts Technology Collaborative as a part of its Technology & Innovation Ecosystem Awards Program. The Health AI Assurance Laboratory may also obtain $137,000 in matching non-public funding.

“We are committed to researching and developing health AI tools to strengthen our state’s leadership in health care,” mentioned Secretary Hao, who can also be co-chair of the state’s Artificial Intelligence Strategic Task Force. “The new Health AI Assurance Laboratory is an incredible opportunity to grow the AI ecosystem by building strategic partnerships and providing career opportunities to students in data analysis, informatics and machine learning. Through the leadership of the world-class researchers at UMass Chan and MITRE, this new lab will help us build a stronger health AI industry in Massachusetts and accelerate responsible innovation for the global marketplace.”

“UMass Chan, a national leader in research, continues to make great strides to change the course of history of disease,” mentioned Chancellor Michael F. Collins. “Together with MITRE and support from the Innovation Institute at MassTech, current and future health care professionals will be able to create and guide AI technology to fulfill its promise of better, more efficient and more equitable patient care across our communities.” 

The Health AI Assurance Laboratory group is led by Program in Digital Medicine founder David McManus, MD’02, MSc’12, the Richard M. Haidack Professor of Medicine, chair and professor of drugs; Adrian Zai, MD, PhD, MPH, affiliate professor of quantitative & inhabitants well being sciences; and Miles Thompson, AI assurance options lead at MITRE. The group will work with collaborators from training, well being care programs, non-public trade, nonprofit organizations and public businesses to guage particular well being AI purposes. The program builds each on UMass Chan’s Center for Advancing Point of Care Technologies in addition to UMass Chan’s expertise with the National Institutes of Health Rapid Acceleration of Diagnostics or RADx program.

According to Dr. McManus, the Health AI Assurance Laboratory, together with its supplemental information base of instruments and strategies, will consider AI applied sciences utilizing capabilities developed by MITRE’s AI Assurance and Discovery Lab in its Blueprint for Trustworthy AI Implementation Guidance and Assurance for Healthcare. The framework addresses human-centered values and ethics; technical robustness and security; transparency; variety and equity; society and environmental well-being; and accountability.

The Health AI Assurance Laboratory would be the first state-funded AI assurance laboratory and can make use of a “human-in-the-loop” testing framework during which trade companions can consider the affect of recent AI applied sciences in simulated well being care work settings, together with UMass Chan’s interprofessional Center for Experiential Learning and Simulation and thru the Massachusetts Medical Device Development Center, often called M2D2, workspaces at UMass Lowell and UMass Chan, McManus mentioned. iCELS can simulate a variety of eventualities, together with these in clinic rooms, inpatient amenities, eICUs, hospital-at-home environments and different settings.

The initiative goals to spice up the area’s well being AI workforce by internships, an innovation and entrepreneurship coaching course, and partnerships with highschool and undergraduate STEM packages.

Terence R. Flotte, MD, the Celia and Isaac Haidak Professor, government deputy chancellor, provost of UMass Chan and dean of the T.H. Chan School of Medicine, mentioned, “AI has been incorporated into clinical care in numerous ways, but unlike with other interventions, there has been very little regulatory oversight of these tools. Drugs and devices that are used in clinical care must be proven to be safe and effective and are tracked after approval to confirm safety and effectiveness in a real-world setting. That has not been consistently done with AI tools. One of the important goals of the AI assurance labs is to begin to fill this gap.”

“With support from MassTech, we’re excited to partner with UMass Chan Medical School to launch the Health AI Assurance Laboratory,” mentioned Doug Robbins, vice chairman of MITRE. “Having just opened MITRE’s national AI Assurance & Discovery Lab in Northern Virginia, we look forward to sharing our AI assurance resources and expertise with the UMass Chan team. Connecting both labs will be the very first step in creating what we envision as a national network of AI assurance labs, and we celebrate the Bay State for being at the forefront of that movement.”

“Given the immense potential of AI to transform everyday life, we want to be mindful of its overall impact.” mentioned Patrick Larkin, director of the Innovation Institute at MassTech and a member of the AI Strategic Task Force. “That means supporting investments that ultimately provide startups and established companies with the necessary tools, methods, processes, infrastructure and a simulated real-world environment to develop and refine their AI-driven solutions in a controlled setting. This will help promote safety and efficacy, while facilitating collaboration, data sharing, and the development of cutting-edge technologies that will further position Massachusetts as a global leader in health AI. We want to congratulate UMass Chan, MITRE and their partners in building a strong foundation for future, emerging industries across the state.”