UCSF Launches Artificial Intelligence Center to Advance Medical Imaging

The University of California San Francisco {(UCSF) San Francisco, CA, USA} has announced the launch of a new center to accelerate the application of artificial intelligence (AI) technology to radiology, leveraging advanced computational techniques and industry collaborations to improve patient diagnoses and care. The Center for Intelligent Imaging, or ci2, will develop and apply AI to devise powerful new ways to look inside the body and to evaluate health and disease. The center aims to enable transformation via intelligent radiology, with the goal of again collaborating with the industry to become of the first institutions to bring medical imaging AI to the bedside.

UCSF investigators in ci2 will work alongside engineers and data scientists from NVIDIA Corp. (Santa Clara, CA, USA), an industry leader in AI computing, to develop clinical AI tools, applying powerful computational resources that are available in few medical institutions, with the goal of accelerating the AI development cycle and integrating it seamlessly in the clinic. Researchers in the center will use patient images and clinical data from UCSF Health and other institutions to develop, test and validate deep learning algorithms. The center’s computational infrastructure includes NVIDIA’s DGX-2 supercomputer, one of the first to be installed in the medical community. The center also will link academic innovation to startups to promote collaborative AI imaging research and development.


“Artificial intelligence represents the next frontier for diagnostic medicine. It is poised to revolutionize the way in which imaging is performed, interpreted and used to direct care for patients,” said Christopher Hess, MD, PhD, chair of the UCSF Department of Radiology and Biomedical Imaging. “The Center for Intelligent Imaging will serve as a hub for the multidisciplinary development of AI in imaging to meet unmet clinical needs and provide a platform to measure impact and outcomes of this technology. The result will be more efficient, higher-value imaging for patients within and outside of UCSF.”

“AI is one of the greatest tools of this century. ci2 is bringing together an innovative ecosystem of startups, vendors, UCSF’s thought leadership in radiology, and NVIDIA’s Clara platform on the world’s fastest GPUs, to create imaging AI solutions for improving patient care,” said Abdul Hamid Halabi, director of healthcare at NVIDIA.

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