DukeMed Alumni News

Clinicians, researchers, and educators at Duke University School of Medicine and across Duke Health are using artificial intelligence (AI) to schedule surgeries more efficiently, give students immediate feedback on academic writing, and help speed up drug discovery. Duke is at the leading edge of efforts to maximize the benefits of AI in health care while putting effective guardrails in place to minimize potential risks. “We have a huge potential to reduce physician burden, increase health care efficiency, and improve the patient experience,” said Michael Pencina, PhD, director of Duke AI Health and chief data scientist for Duke Health. “But we need to be very intentional about what AI will be doing.”

School of Medicine faculty are using the capabilities of ChatGPT, a chatbot that answers questions and generates text using natural language processing, to improve students’ learning experiences and assist with their own research. At the same time, they caution that monitoring and fact-checking the system are essential.

The internet, pervasive social media, and round-the-clock news sites have put a world’s worth of knowledge literally at our fingertips: with a click or two you can summon vast amounts of information about almost anything. Unfortunately, a lot of it is wrong. Duke researchers are working to combat false health claims.

William Stead, AB’70, MD’74, HS’73-’77, is the McKesson Foundation Professor of Biomedical Informatics and Medicine at Vanderbilt University and is one of the founders of the field of biomedical informatics. In the 1970s, first as a medical student and then while a nephrology fellow and member of the faculty at Duke, Stead worked with Ed Hammond, BSEE’57, PhD’67, director of the Duke Center for Health Informatics, and others to build The Medical Record, one of the first practical electronic medical record systems.

Erich Huang, PhD’02, MD’03, HS’03-’08, is head of clinical informatics at Verily, formerly Google Life Sciences. He has been a pathfinder since transitioning in 2016 from clinical care to biomedical informatics and later directing Duke Forge, an initiative to build a data science culture and infrastructure focused on actionable health data science across Duke University. In 2020 he was selected as Duke Health’s Chief Data Officer for Quality. Now the head of clinical informatics at Verily, formerly Google Life Sciences, his vision for the health care landscape remains centered on wielding artificial intelligence as a tool, not a replacement for the human touch.

If you want typical medical students, a typical admissions process might do. But Duke University School of Medicine is not looking for typical medical students. That’s why the admissions process is tailor-made to go beyond transcripts and test scores to identify students who will not only thrive at Duke but will also have a significant impact throughout their careers.

Recently developed technologies that maintain donor organs in a functioning state, perfusing them with warm nutrient- and oxygen-rich blood, have dramatically expanded the length of time organs can be kept viable and thus the distance they can be transported. These improvements make more transplants possible — a critical advance in a field where more than 100,000 people are on transplant waiting lists in the U.S.

By any reckoning, Duke is one of the top organ transplant centers in the world, a leader in patient care and outcomes, innovative research, and training. Duke ranks among the top five transplant centers by volume, with some of the shortest average wait times and best survival rates in the U.S. Duke researchers are pushing the frontiers of the possible, not only in the operating room but also in tackling issues of equity and social factors that play an outsized role in transplant access and outcomes.

Rosalyn “Roz” Bernstein Mannon, MD’85, HS’85-’90, professor of medicine, pathology, and microbiology and vice-chair for research in the Department of Medicine at the University of Nebraska, says more research is needed to understand how sex and gender affect transplant immunology, access, and outcomes. As past chair of Women in Transplantation, she has helped programs to fund such research internationally and to advocate for women in transplant around the world.

David Axelrod, professor of surgery and surgical director of kidney/pancreas and living donor transplant at the University of Iowa, explores the intersection of economics and medicine. Solid organ transplantation, he says, poses a unique set of complex challenges not only medically but also in terms of cost of care, organ allocation, and access to services.