Cleveland Clinic has taken its partnership with IBM to a global level, aiming to advance healthcare delivery and research with artificial intelligence and quantum computing.
The two organizations said June 6 they are collaborating with the Hartree Centre, a high-performance computing data analytics and AI firm based in the United Kingdom.
"Besides being global now, this [project] is integrating both AI and quantum computing under a vision of using advanced compute to progress life sciences and healthcare," Lara Jehi, MD, chief research information officer of Cleveland Clinic, told Becker's.
Two projects are planned from the collaboration. In one, Cleveland Clinic London and Hartree Centre will employ AI to track patients' treatments and outcomes and analyze how their quality of life has been impacted by care at the hospital, which opened in 2021. In the other, Dr. Jehi will work with IBM and the Hartree Centre, using quantum computing to predict the surgical response of epilepsy patients and uncover biomarkers that could help in their treatment.
"It is not a very common disease, but it's a very difficult disease to manage for the patients who have it. It has very high morbidity, very high mortality. And epilepsy surgery is now the best treatment that we have for it," Dr. Jehi said. "But we are still limited in our ability to target who gets surgery and how to manage them optimally around surgery for the best outcomes."
Cleveland Clinic has already deployed existing computing power in this area of research, including AI. "So we need to push the envelope to that next stage, and that's when we go to quantum," Dr. Jehi said. Quantum computers can handle much more data, and faster, than the traditional variety.
"I hope that with these tools, we will get closer to what a learning healthcare system should be," she added. "Hopefully, with the computational tools that AI can offer, we can get closer toward that goal of learning from our data to better help our patients.
"Quantum computing, on the other hand, is a path to really transform how we do biomedical research, to accelerate our path to discovering biomarkers, to discovering drugs, to understanding mechanisms of disease. It just allows us [to answer] questions that AI is not ready for, is not designed for."