New Collaboration With NewYork-Presbyterian Aims to Transform Healthcare Delivery

Organizations will advance cardiovascular medicine with the use of advanced analytics and artificial intelligence, moving towards prediction and prevention of heart disease.

NewYork-Presbyterian, with physicians from its affiliated medical schools Weill Cornell Medicine and Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons (Columbia University VP&S), are collaborating with Cornell Tech and the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science (Cornell Bowers CIS) to transform cardiovascular health and heart disease prediction and prevention using artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning.

NewYork-Presbyterian will support Cornell with $15 million over three years to fund the initiative aimed to improve heart failure treatment, as well as predict and prevent heart failure. Researchers from Cornell Tech and Cornell Bowers CIS will collaborate with physicians from Columbia University VP&S and Weill Cornell Medicine to use AI and machine learning to examine multi-modal data and detect patterns that will help predict who will develop heart failure, inform care decisions and tailor treatments for their patients. The initiative brings together NewYork-Presbyterian, Columbia University VP&S and Weill Cornell Medicine’s technical, clinical and research expertise in cardiovascular medicine with Cornell Tech and Cornell Bowers CIS’s leadership in advanced machine learning and AI.

“NewYork-Presbyterian is thrilled to be joining forces with Cornell Tech and Cornell Bowers CIS to harness advanced technology and develop insights into the prediction and prevention of heart disease to benefit our patients,” said Dr. Steven J. Corwin, president and chief executive officer of NewYork-Presbyterian. “Together with our world-class physicians from Weill Cornell Medicine and Columbia, we can transform the way health care is delivered.”

“Artificial intelligence and technology are changing our society and the way we practice medicine,” said Dr. Nir Uriel, director of advanced heart failure and cardiac transplantation at NewYork-Presbyterian. “We look forward to building a bridge into the future of medicine and using advanced technology to provide tools to enhance care for our heart failure patients,” said Dr. Uriel, who is also a professor of medicine in the Division of Cardiology at Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons and an adjunct professor of medicine in the Greenberg Division of Cardiology at Weill Cornell Medicine.

Researchers and clinicians anticipate the data from a diverse patient population will answer questions around heart failure prediction, diagnosis, prognosis, risk and treatment, and guide physicians as they make decisions around heart transplants and LVADs (pumps for patients who have reached end-stage heart failure). Future research will tackle the task of heart failure and disease prediction to intervene earlier with those most likely to experience heart failure and preempt progression of cardiac conditions and damaging cardiac events.

“Major algorithmic advances are needed to derive precise and reliable clinical insights from complex medical data,” said Deborah Estrin, associate dean for impact at Cornell Tech and a professor of population health sciences at Weill Cornell Medicine. “We are excited about the opportunity to partner with leading cardiologists at NewYork-Presbyterian to advance the state-of-the-art in caring for heart failure and other challenging cardiovascular conditions.”

“AI is poised to fundamentally transform outcomes in cardiovascular health care by providing doctors with better models for diagnosis and risk prediction in heart disease,” said Kavita Bala, professor of computer science and dean of Cornell Bowers CIS. “This unique collaboration between Cornell’s world-leading experts in machine learning and AI and outstanding cardiologists and clinicians from NewYork-Presbyterian, Weill Cornell Medicine and Columbia will drive this next wave of innovation for long-lasting impact on cardiovascular health care.”