AI & Healthcare
Helping Neurosurgeons Map the Brain
Brad Mahon, associate professor of psychology, and his colleagues are using AI to innovate neurosurgery. Every brain is unique, and the exact location where cognitive functions reside may vary by a few centimeters from person-to-person. This real estate matters. Neurosurgeons navigate on the millimeter scale while making decisions about where to cut during brain surgery. Mahon and his team have developed MindTrace Technologies Inc. (MindTrace), a CMU spinoff company that uses AI to forecast how a given surgical cutting path during brain surgery could affect a patient’s future mental function.
Read more about Mahon's research at the Concepts, Actions and Objects Lab
Identifying New Applications for Existing Drugs
Before a drug can be used by doctors, pharmaceutical companies are required to conduct clinical trials to demonstrate to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration that it is safe and effective. Novartis, a global healthcare company based in Switzerland, sees great potential in mining large drug datasets to seek potential new uses for drugs beyond their original approved application. Joel Greenhouse, professor of statistics, is working with Novartis to develop and apply new statistical techniques to the company’s large drug outcome datasets with the goal of helping the company identify personalized treatments for diseases, including cancer.