As AI tools are rapidly making their way into healthcare, Adrienne Kline is one researcher leading the way in development.
Head of AI and engineering at Illinois-based Northwestern Medicine’s Center for Artificial Intelligence at the Bluhm Cardiovascular Institute, Kline received $1.4 million in research grants in the last year from tech giants Amazon, Microsoft, and Nvidia to develop new AI technologies for both patients and healthcare administrators.
These companies regularly make investments into AI, with Microsoft pledging in January $80 billion to create AI-enabled data centers to train models and deploy AI and cloud-based applications globally.
With this funding, Kline spearheaded the creation of a medical deidentification tool called PixelGuard, which removes identifying data for safe sharing of sensitive health information. The assistant professor at Northwestern also led the creation of a multimodal cardiac platform, Project Corazon, which reads MRI slices to diagnose cardiac abnormalities.
Kline spoke with Healthcare Brew about how she’s used research grants over the past year and what she’s working on now.
Maintaining connections. While Kline was finishing her postdoctorate in the department of preventive medicine, private tech companies wanted to recruit her. She ultimately decided to stay in academia, though, because she wanted more autonomy to choose what she would work on, she said.
Since Kline was already on these companies’ radars, they contacted her with grant offers and gave her another way to collaborate on ideas she had. With National Institutes of Health funding cuts issued by the Trump administration (funding is still frozen at Northwestern), industry financing provided her an opportunity to continue “really important” research, she said.
“Some of these industry partnerships are a bit of a godsend to continue to get your research pushed through and get your research published,” she said, which ultimately helps researchers try “to make a difference in the world.”
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Working hard drive. De-indeification tools, like the one she built, aren’t “sexy,” Kline said, but they are essential for protecting data sharing, including within hospitals or between industry partners.
PixelGuard does this for images, she said, meaning healthcare providers can safely share MRI slices externally, like, for example, with a health plan that wants to double-check it for billing purposes.
She worked with Amazon and IT company ScaleCapacity to develop the tool, which took about seven months from “pitch to deployment,” she said.
Working with Nvidia, Amazon Web Services, and tech company Quantiphi, Kline also led the development of a program, Project Corazon that can read cardiac MRI scans and assess medical images “the way a radiologist would.” In other words, the tool uses AI to assist clinicians in making diagnoses.
Project Corazon is not ready to be used in hospitals yet, Kline said, but with the CDC reporting 6.7 million US residents over 20 as having heart failure, she sees the need to ease the diagnostic process.
What next? After sitting in on a faculty meeting and hearing about scheduling challenges, Kline started drawing up plans for a new operating room scheduling tool.
When completed (she’s aiming for November or December), the tool will review items like surgeons, beds, and room availability as well as emergent patient needs to find the most efficient way to conduct procedures.
“We want high utilization, but we also want to ensure that our emergencies are handled without delay, taking into account people going on vacation or [getting] sick,” she said, “because that really ties back to hospital profit margins.”