Cleveland Clinic has launched a center to advance the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in healthcare.

A project of Cleveland Clinic Enterprise Analytics, the Center for Clinical Artificial Intelligence will seek new and innovative applications of AI for diagnostics, disease prediction and treatment planning. It also aims to foster collaboration and communication between physicians, researchers and data-scientists; offer programmatic and technology support for AI initiatives at the Clinic; and conduct research in several areas of medicine.

Already, researchers at the center are developing new machine learning models for more accurate clinical decision support, quality improvement, predictions of length or stay and readmission risk and other use cases, officials said. And other initiatives focused on oncology are also underway, exploring how AI can enable personalized outcomes prediction, for instance, or boost the accuracy of computer-aided detection in pathology slides.

"Cleveland Clinic has formed the Center for Clinical Artificial Intelligence to translate AI-based concepts into clinical tools that will improve patient care and advance medical research," said Dr. Aziz Nazha, director of the new center and associate medical director for AI, in a prepared statement.

Cleveland Clinic has been at the forefront of medical innovation for decades, and it's long been well-positioned to benefit from the technology transformation that's been occurring in the 21st Century and help other hospitals and health systems do the same.

Researchers are building machine-learning models for several projects using AI technologies in diagnostics, prognosis, treatment decision-making, and patient outcomes, according to the release. Projects already underway are using a cohort of more than one million patients admitted to the Clinic. These include building models to identify patients with high risk of death during admission and predict inpatient length of stay and readmission risk with a higher degree of accuracy than existing models, according to the release.

This spring, from May 13-15, Cleveland Clinic will partner with HIMSS for its Empathy & Innovation Summit, billed as the biggest independent conference in the world devoted to improving patient experience and engagement – and exploring, in part, how emerging technologies such as AI will impact both.