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Drs. Giger, Chung, Armato and Li awarded grant funding by C3.ai DTI for COVID-19 research

Congratulations to Dr. Maryellen Giger, Dr. Jonathan Chung, Dr. Samuel Armato and Dr. Hui Lui on being selected to receive funding from the C3.ai Digital Transformation Institute (C3.ai DTI) for their COVID-19 research project entitled “Medical Imaging Domain-Expertise Machine Learning for Interrogation of COVID”. Additional information regarding the research project can be found below. The C3.ai DTI will be awarding approximately $1 million in total to the three selected research project teams (including Drs. Giger, Chung, Armato and Hui's team) as part of the Institute’s inaugural round of seed grant awards.

“Medical Imaging Domain-Expertise Machine Learning for Interrogation of COVID”: The COVID-19 pandemic represents a pressing public health need for computational techniques to augment the interpretation of medical images in their role for: 1) surveillance, detection, and triaging of COVID-19 medical images given potential resurgence; 2) differential diagnosis of COVID-19 patients; and 3) prognosis, as well as prediction and monitoring of treatment response, to help in patient management.

While thoracic imaging, including chest radiography and computed tomography (CT), are being re-examined for their role in patient management, the limitations for improved interpretation are partially due to the qualitative interpretation of the images, and thus this project’s aim is to develop machine intelligence methods to aid in the interrogation of medical images from COVID-19 patients. Successful completion of the research will demonstrate cascade-based deep transfer learning between similar but different thoracic disease states (e.g., interstitial diseases to COVID) and a clinical tool to aid in the triaging of COVID patients in terms of detection, treatment planning, and monitoring.

Research team: Maryellen L. Giger, A.N. Pritzker Professor of Radiology, Committee on Medical Physics, and the College at the University of Chicago; Jonathan Chung, MD, Vice Chair of Quality and Section Chief of Cardiopulmonary Imaging at the University of Chicago; Samuel Armato, Associate Professor of Radiology at the University of Chicago; Ravi Madduri, Computational Scientist in the Mathematics and Computer Science division at Argonne National Laboratory and a senior research fellow at the Computation Institute at the University of Chicago; and Hui Li, Research Associate Professor, University of Chicago.

The C3.ai Digital Transformation Institute is a new research consortium established by C3.ai, Microsoft Corporation, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), the University of California, Berkeley, Princeton University, the University of Chicago, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Carnegie Mellon University, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at UIUC, and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory at UC Berkeley. Jointly managed and hosted by UC Berkeley and UIUC, C3.ai DTI was created to establish the new Science of Digital Transformation of Societal Systems.