The Boston Children’s Hospital Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning Working Group gives our clinicians and investigators a forum for sharing knowledge and collaborating across the many facets of artificial intelligence and machine learning.

Core objectives:

  • create a forum for Boston Children’s Hospital investigators to find like-minded collaborators
  • foster an environment of knowledge exchange
  • collaborate on funding options to improve infrastructure
  • create a unified body for industry discussions

Focus areas:

  • clinical decision making
  • image processing and interpretation
  • hospital administrative functions and capacity planning
  • basic methods
  • life sciences and drug development
  • omics research and omics-informed medicine

Participating programs and sponsors include:

We host:

  • quarterly workgroup meetings
  • seminars
  • journal clubs

Please send an email to register your interest in joining.

Previous Events

Real-world COVID-19 Vaccine Effectiveness and the Mass Vaccination Experience in Israel

Speaker: Ben Reis, PhD, Director, Predictive Medicine Group, Computational Health Informatics Program (CHIP), Faculty at at Harvard Medical School

Date: March 16, 2021 at 2:00PM - 3:00PM

Dr. Ben Reis will lead a discussion on the recent New England Journal of Medicine paper he co-authored, providing the first real-world study of effectiveness of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine. It was the largest study yet to quantify the impact of the vaccine outside the confines of a clinical trial. The study used innovative epidemiological methods to analyze vaccine effectiveness for preventing symptomatic diseases, severe illness and death. Dr.

BCH AI and Machine Learning Working Group Journal Club: James Diao

Speaker: James Diao, MD, Harvard Medical School MD Student at Boston Children's Hospital

Date: February 23, 2021 at 2:00PM - 3:00PM

James will lead a discussion on approaches to addressing racial equity concerns with clinical algorithms, including for arthritis severity (Pierson et al. 2021) and kidney function estimates (Diao et al. 2021):

Let us get practical: developing and disseminating AI research and workflows to audiences of researchers and clinicians within BCH using the ChRIS platform

Speaker: Rudolph Pienaar, PhD, Staff Scientist at Boston Children's Hospital

Date: January 29, 2021 at 09:30AM - 10:30AM

We are often wowed by the *potential* of AI (and frankly other sophisticated computational approaches) to transform research and clinical workflows. New approaches seem to magically hold unbounded promise. Yet, there is often a large gulf between theory and practice, between a shiny new technique and having anyone just use it. The questions of "How do I get this ? How do I get my data from PACS to connect to this? How do I go from DICOM to something that the neural network wants?

BCH AI and Machine Learning Journal Club: Guergana Savova, PhD

Speaker: Guergana Savova, PhD, Associate Professor of Pediatrics, Computational Health Informatics Program at Boston Children's Hospital

Date: December 8, 2020 at 4:45PM - 5:30PM

Dr. Savova led a discussion of tasks and applications of clinical Natural Language Processing (NLP) in medicine, such as:

BCH AI and Machine Learning Journal Club: Danielle Rasooly, PhD

Speaker: Danielle Rasooly, PhD, Postdoctoral Fellow, Computational Health Informatics Program at Boston Children's Hospital

Date: November 10, 2020 at 4:45PM - 5:30PM

Dr. Rasooly led a discussion of the following paper about Google/DeepMind's AI system for breast cancer screening:

The Age of Predictive Medicine

Speaker: Ben Reis, PhD, Faculty, Computational Health Informatics Program (CHIP); Director, Predictive Medicine Group, Computational Health Informatics Program (CHIP) Assistant Professor of Pediatrics, Harvard Medical School at Boston Children's Hospital

Date: October 16, 2020 at 09:30AM - 10:30AM

Dr. Ben Reis discussed recent developments in machine learning approaches to some of the grandest challenges of human health, including pandemic prediction, suicide prevention, bioterrorism detection, and drug safety prediction. The focus was on understanding both the methodological challenges involved and the ramifications of generating actionable predictions in these critical areas. The talk concluded by formulating a set of central challenges and opportunities facing the field of Predictive Medicine.

BCH AI and Machine Learning Working Group Lightning Talks

Date: September 9, 2020 at 09:30AM - 10:30AM

The BCH AI and Machine Learning Working Group held our first Lightning Talks session, where multiple investigators gave brief overviews of numerous Machine Learning applications at Boston Children’s Hospital to foster clinical and machine learning collaborations across the hospital.

A Gold Mine of Potential: Predictive Analytics Using Boston Children’s Hospital’s “Children’s 360” Data Warehouse

Speaker: Jonathan Bickel, MD, MS; Ronald Wilkinson, MA, MS, CBIP; Ashley Doherty, MS, at

Date: August 14, 2020 at 09:30AM - 10:30AM

Boston Children’s Hospital data warehouse integrates 15 years of extensive clinical and administrative data sources and more years of selected data sources. While the contents are used extensively for daily operational reporting, the potential for extensive retrospective and predictive analytics is largely untapped.

AI in 3D Medical Images: Concepts, Milestones, and Opportunities

Speaker: Yangming Ou, PhD, Assistant Professor of Radiology; Affiliate Faculty, Computational Health Informatics Program; Faculty, Fetal-Neonatal Neuroimaging Data Science Center at Boston Children's Hospital

Date: July 17, 2020 at 09:30AM - 10:30AM

Dr. Yangming Ou briefly reviewed some major concepts and milestones of AI in medical images. The focus of Dr. Ou’s talk was on 3D medical images, for AI’s application in disease diagnosis, outcome prediction, early screening, neuroscience, and others. Dr. Ou then discussed some major challenges and potential opportunities, including further improving accuracy in detecting small diffuse lesions, and facilitating AI in small sample sizes.

BCH AI and Machine Learning Journal Club: Tim Miller, PhD

Speaker: Tim Miller, PhD, Assistant Professor of Pediatrics, Computational Health Informatics Program at Boston Children's Hospital

Date: June 30, 2020 at 4:45PM - 5:30PM

Dr. Timothy Miller discussed articles that he recently published on natural language processing of computerized text.

Gallery

David Clark image
Dr. Ken Mandl and Ricky Bloomfield image