Seminar: Is Medical Artificial Intelligence Possible in Low-Resource Settings?

Artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms have been around for decades. Yet a lack of access to large amounts of high quality data has historically limited applications of AI in healthcare. However, a more recent increase in the availability of data has created an opportunity to apply AI algorithms to improve patient outcomes globally. In low and middle-income countries, such data could be used to track disease outbreaks, assess drivers of infectious disease transmission and track drug adherence. While there is immense potential for the use of data, it needs to be integrated across different systems, harmonized and curated. Liberating data from proprietary information systems and breaking down the silos between clinicians and the data scientists remain enormous barriers in the utilization of AI to address global health challenges.

Dr. Leo Anthony Celi has practiced medicine in three continents, giving him broad perspectives in healthcare delivery. He holds a faculty position at Harvard Medical School as an intensive care specialist at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. As clinical research director and principal research scientist at the MIT Laboratory of Computational Physiology (LCP), he brings together clinicians and data scientists to support research using data routinely collected in the intensive care unit (ICU). Leo founded and co-directs Sana, a cross-disciplinary organization based at the Institute for Medical Engineering and Science at MIT, whose objective is to leverage information technology to improve health outcomes in low- and middle-income countries. At its core is an open-source mobile tele-health platform that allows for capture, transmission and archiving of complex medical data, in addition to patient demographic and clinical information. Sana is the inaugural recipient of both the mHealth (Mobile Health) Alliance Award from the United Nations Foundation and the Wireless Innovation Award from the Vodafone Foundation in 2010. The software has since been implemented around the globe including India, Kenya, Lebanon, Haiti, Mongolia, Uganda, Brazil, Ethiopia, Argentina, and South Africa.