By Stephen Nellis
(Reuters) – The Mayo Clinic, a nonprofit medical center based in Rochester, Minnesota, on Monday said it will partner with Silicon Valley startup Cerebras Systems to develop artificial intelligence (AI) models for the health care industry.
The Mayo Clinic, which has three major campuses in the U.S. in addition to locations in the U.K. and United Arab Emirates, will use computing chips and systems from Cerebras to tap into decades of anonymized medical records and data to develop its own AI models.
Matthew Callstrom, Mayo’s medical director for strategy and chair of its radiology department, said some of the models will be able to read and write text to do things like summarize the most important parts of a lengthy medical record for a new patient. Other models will be able to scour images for patterns that the human eyes of trained medical experts may not detect or to analyze genome data. The systems themselves will not make medical decisions – that will still be done by doctors.
“How do you make the right decision for each patient? You have to weigh all those factors, you have to have a lot of experience. That’s where AI comes in to start to augment that,” Callstrom said in an interview.
Mayo plans to make the outcome of its work with Cerebras will eventually be made available on its Mayo Clinic Platform, a data network that is also used by the Mercy health care system in the U.S., the University Health Network in Canada, along with systems in Brazil and Israel.
Callstrom said Mayo has not yet decided how much it will charge for the AI technology. The clinic planned to disclose the new effort during an address at JPMorgan Chase’s JPM.N health care conference in San Francisco.
Cerebras Chief Executive Officer Andrew Feldman said the deal was a “multi-million-dollar” agreement over several years but declined to give more specifics. Cerbras, which one of several AI chip starts aiming to challenge market leader Nvidia NVDA.O, will provide both hardware and software development services to Mayo under the deal.
(Reporting by Stephen Nellis in San Francisco; Editing by David Gregorio)