The National Institutes of Health (NIH) is going to invest $130 million over four years depending on the availability of funds to accelerate the widespread use of AI by the biomedical and behavioral research communities.
The Bridge to Artificial Intelligence (Bridge2AI) https://commonfund.nih.gov/bridge2ai program is assembling team members from diverse disciplines and backgrounds to generate tools, resources, and detailed data responsive to AI approaches.
Bridge2AI researchers will create standards for the development of state-of-the-art AI-ready data sets that have the potential to help solve some of challenges in human health. This includes how genetic, behavioral, and environmental factors can influence a person’s physical condition throughout their lifetime.
One project underway as part of the Bridge2AI program involves the University of South Florida in collaboration with Weill Cornell Medicine and ten other institutions in the U.S., Canada, plus the French American AI biotech startup Owkin.
The project called “Voice as a Biomarker of Health” is a project recently funded by the Bridge2AI program. The Voice Project is going to build a sourced database of diverse human voices while protecting patient privacy.
Using the data, machine learning models will be able to spot diseases by detecting changes in the human voice. Data collected for this project will center on voice disorders, neurological and neurodegenerative disorders, mood and psychiatric disorders, respiratory disorders, and pediatric voice and speed disorders.
AI experts. bioethicists and social scientists, aim to transform the fundamental understanding of diseases and introduce a revolutionary new method for diagnosing and treating diseases in clinical settings. Diagnosing diseases through the voice using AI could prove to be a transformative step in precision medicine and accessibility.