A new center is being established at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis to “develop AI-based imaging tools to improve the diagnosis and precision treatment of cancers, cardiovascular disease, neurological diseases, and numerous other conditions.”

The new Center for Computational and AI-enabled Imaging Services will “help advance AI-driven imaging technologies,” including a tool that can “analyze mammograms to predict an individual patient’s risk of breast cancer over the next five years” and another that “rapidly maps the brain to help neurosurgeons plan delicate surgeries and avoid sensitive areas that control speech, movement, and cognitive function.”

Specifically, the center will “focus on developing AI-based medical imaging applications that integrate information from different imaging types – ranging from digital microscope images of cells to MRI scans to X-rays – to identify clinically informative connections between them.” All of the participating departments will have their information housed in the center, enabling “increasingly precise diagnosis for individual patients.”

AI algorithms “applied to medical imaging have already been used to detect and classify new subtypes of some disorders in ways that can guide clinical treatment decisions.” The new center’s leader, Mark Anastasio, says that these types of centers will “lead the next revolution in healthcare.” Others say the wave of innovation spurred by AI will be “as transformative for medicine as earlier waves of innovation – from the adoption of electronic health records to the rise of precision medicine and the advent of real-world evidence generation.”