$15M Collaboration Aims to Advance Cardiovascular Care with Analytics, AI

July 18, 2022 - NewYork-Presbyterian, with physicians from its affiliated medical schools, Weill Cornell Medicine and Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons (Columbia University VP&S), is collaborating with Cornell Tech and the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science (Cornell Bowers CIS) to improve cardiovascular care with artificial intelligence (AI).

Under the partnership, NewYork-Presbyterian will provide $15 million over three years to fund the initiative, which is focused on predicting and preventing heart failure while also improving heart failure treatment in cases that cannot be prevented. The collaboration is designed to combine NewYork-Presbyterian, Columbia University VP&S, and Weill Cornell Medicine’s expertise in cardiovascular medicine with Cornell Tech and Cornell Bowers CIS’s advanced machine learning (ML) and AI resources, according to the press release.

Researchers from Cornell Tech and Cornell Bowers CIS will work with physicians from Columbia University VP&S and Weill Cornell Medicine to develop and utilize AI and ML capable of examining multi-modal data and detecting patterns that can help predict which patients will develop heart failure. These insights have the potential to inform care decisions and help clinicians tailor treatments for their patients, the press release states.

“Artificial intelligence and technology are changing our society and the way we practice medicine,” said Nir Uriel, MD, director of advanced heart failure and cardiac transplantation at NewYork-Presbyterian, in the press release. “We look forward to building a bridge into the future of medicine and using advanced technology to provide tools to enhance care for our heart failure patients.”

By collecting data from a diverse patient population, researchers hope to answer key questions around heart failure prediction, diagnosis, prognosis, risk, and treatment, according to the press release. Such information can guide physicians as they make decisions around heart transplants and left ventricular assist devices (LVADs) for patients who have reached end-stage heart failure. However, researchers quoted in the press release note that “major algorithmic advances” are needed to gain reliable, useful clinical insights from complex data.

Future research conducted through the collaboration will focus on heart failure and disease prediction, using analytics and AI models to enable earlier interventions for those most likely to experience heart failure and preempt the progression of cardiac conditions and damaging cardiac events.

“AI is poised to fundamentally transform outcomes in cardiovascular health care by providing doctors with better models for diagnosis and risk prediction in heart disease,” said Kavita Bala, PhD, professor of computer science and dean of Cornell Bowers CIS. “This unique collaboration between Cornell’s world-leading experts in machine learning and AI and outstanding cardiologists and clinicians from NewYork-Presbyterian, Weill Cornell Medicine and Columbia will drive this next wave of innovation for long-lasting impact on cardiovascular health care.”