FIMM CONTRIBUTES TO THE UNITED NATIONS GLOBAL INITIATIVE ON AI FOR HEALTH
In order to promote and scale up artificial intelligence (AI) solutions for health, a new United Nations initiative spearheaded by three UN specialised agencies was launched this summer. FIMM supports the goals of the initiative by leading the AI for point-of-care diagnostics topic group.
Article originally appeared at FIMM website: https://www.helsinki.fi/en/hilife-helsinki-institute-life-science/news/fimm-contributes-united-nations-global-initiative-ai-health
Artificial intelligence (AI) -based diagnostic methods enable more accurate, efficient, and accessible cancer diagnostics, partly by automation and partly by a decreased need for expertise at the point-of-care.
To drive the global implementation of AI solutions for health, a new Global Initiative on Artificial Intelligence for Health was launched in Geneva by the General Directors of WHO (Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus), ITU (Doreen Bogdan-Martin and WIPO (Edward Kwakwa) on July 6 during the #ai4good Global Summit.
The initiative will take forward the guidance, standardization, and benchmarking framework created during 2018 by the ITU-WHO Focus Group AI for Health (AI4H) for enabling, facilitating, and implementing the adoption of AI-based technologies into healthcare.
Among 24 Topic Groups that were formed within AI4H, five have so far been included in the Global Initiative. The topic group on AI for point-of-care diagnostics (TG-POC) headed by FIMM researcher Nina Linder (MD, PhD) is one of these.
The launch of the Global Initiative was preceded by the 19th meeting and workshop of the ITU/WHO Focus Group AI4H July 3–5, 2023. Updates were presented by working groups and topic groups (covering specific health/AI use cases, producing case studies, and proposing procedures to benchmark AI models). As a topic group driver for TG-POC, Nina Linder gave updates regarding ongoing projects headed by researchers at FIMM, University of Helsinki.
The meeting was followed by an AI for health workshop, focusing on the achievements of the Focus Group and sessions around the objectives of the future United Nations Global Initiative.
“I am proud to be a contributor to this important United nations-driven initiative and I am looking forward to a strong contribution with the research performed at FIMM to implement AI driven diagnostics for clinical implementation at the point-of-care in a global perspective,” says Dr. Linder.