Researchers at the Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center and Whiting School of Engineering have announced two new projects that combine cancer research with artificial intelligence.
The two centers are founding members of the Cancer AI Alliance (CAIA), which was founded in 2024 and is “built on a federated learning platform, which allows each of the participating cancer centers to keep their data secure while developing and sharing AI models.”
One of the projects involves a research team “fine-tuning a large language model using structured electronic health record data” to “follow patient trajectories over time, learning patterns that would allow it to predict later diagnoses, treatments, or test results.”
The second project is “harnessing multicenter data to study IDH-mutant glioma and astrocytoma, rare subtypes of brain cancer. For the first time…researchers are able to analyze practice patterns and outcomes across institutions from real-world use of new precision therapies for these tumors by leveraging the CAIA multi-cloud federated learning platform.”
These two studies are “among eight projects launched under CAIA,” and leaders at the alliance are hoping to “expand to dozens of research models and add more cancer centers to the alliance, tackling challenges from predicting treatment response to understanding rare cancers.”
