GVSU faculty, researchers highlight AI’s role in future of medicine

For Kevin Maupin, his research is particularly personal since his son was diagnosed with leukemia in 2019. Maupin's project explores AI's ability to recognize patterns within a patient's medical history that can help predict and guide personalized therapies.

"I'm very focused on this predictive aspect, and AI looking at different factors, particularly in the electronic health records or medical imaging, and how we can use that to make predictions," said Maupin, an assistant professor in the College of Computing.

"I don't want to get rid of clinicians or radiologists. I want them to serve as the guard rails because I think we're a long way off from having AI guide itself in terms of making these clinical decisions."

Maupin added that while his son is now healthy, lingering side effects remain, underscoring the need for better predictive tools.

"We need to get eventually to the point where we have something broader, something that could be more generalized in terms of its ability to predict," Maupin said. "But to get there, it's hard. All the different tests that you get, they live in different places, different databases, different formats.

"The AI needs to be able to reach out to all of these different places. We need to link outcomes to inputs from these multimodal data sets."

Other featured presenters included the Van Andel Institute's Andrew Pospisilik, who discussed AI's applications to the field of epigenetics and Zoom's Ron Strachan and Donald Dembinski, who discussed how Zoom'sAI-first platform enhances health care communication.