NCSA Affiliates Receive Funding For AI-Powered Brain Mapping

An initiative originally funded by the Healthcare Innovation Program Office at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications received a seed grant from the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology to bring the goals of mapping the human brain with artificial intelligence and advancing diagnosis and treatment methods one step closer to fruition.

NCSA faculty affiliates Zhi-Pei Liang and Bradley P. Sutton and Center for Artificial Intelligence Innovation Director Volodomyr Kindratenko are three of six co-principal investigators on the team whose vision is to pair AI and advanced brain mapping technologies to elevate clinicians’ capability to diagnose, monitor and treat debilitating neural diseases.

Ours is the first attempt in the world to develop next-generation AI-enabled brain mapping technologies capable of unraveling the structural, functional and molecular fingerprints of brain function and diseases.

Zhi-Pei Liang, NCSA Faculty Affiliate and Co-PI of the project

In 2022, HIPO initiated a relationship with Beckman Institute and sponsored an NCSA Fellows project titled “Synergistic Integration of AI with MR Spectroscopic Imaging to Unravel Molecular Fingerprints of Brain Function and Neurodegenerative Diseases.” The seed grant further cements the innovative collaboration between the two.

NCSA will operate select machine learning and computational tasks for the project, while imaging and processing work for this project will take place at the Beckman Institute. The preliminary brain mapping data obtained through this project will be used to apply for a larger grant, which is intended to fund a dedicated research center at the Beckman Institute.

This project is one of three that received funding from the new research seed grants program started by the Beckman Institute. Read more on all of the projects in the original announcement found here.