Transforming pediatric care: How AI is driving the next medical revolution

The future of healthcare is unfolding before scientists and clinicians: Doctors are assisted by virtual scribes trained by artificial intelligence. Algorithms are reading MRIs. Smartphones are helping to detect strep throat. Machines diagnose children without access to care.

These and dozens of other artificial intelligence (AI) applications are being tested to enhance pediatric healthcare, and many were on display at the 2nd annual Children’s National Hospital-Virginia Tech Symposium on AI for Pediatric Health at the Children’s National Research & Innovation Campus.

Some highlights from the daylong conversation about the future of pediatric medicine, augmented by AI and generative AI models capable of producing new and critical content:

• Marius George Linguraru, D.Phil., M.A., M.Sc., the Connor Family Professor in Research and Innovation and principal investigator in the Sheikh Zayed Institute for Pediatric Surgical Innovation: “Children are just not mini-adults. In pediatric care, we train pediatric specialists because kids die from different diseases than those that kill adults. Children also suffer from very impactful and rare conditions. If we train pediatric specialists well, we have to train AI algorithms in the same fashion.”
• Rowland Illing, M.D., Ph.D., chief medical officer and director of global healthcare and nonprofits at Amazon Web Services: “In a short period of time, the complexity of the models available is astounding. Generative AI, just like AI, can impact outcomes at every step of the patient pathway, including the clinical workflow, care management and patient engagement. By creating a specific use case with generative AI, every step can be optimized to be smarter, which ultimately leads to improved patient care and outcomes.”
• Children’s National Chief Academic Officer Nathan Kuppermann, M.D., M.P.H.: “AI in pediatric health is not just about identifying rare diseases. Its potential includes all aspects of clinical care, clinical operations, education and research. It has the potential to help educators enhance the novelty and impact of their methods and advance research with powerful tools to gather and analyze data.”
• Alda Mizaku, vice president and chief data and artificial intelligence officer at Children’s National: “What excites me most about our future is the endless possibilities. We can use AI and data to uncover many things: rare diseases, operational efficiencies, time-saving and cost-saving solutions. This has to be done in a responsible way, and we must look at what some of the guardrails need to be.”

Throughout the day, expert panels offered insights into regulatory pathways to deploy AI in pediatric drugs and devices. The Food and Drug Administration’s Office of Science and Engineering Laboratories also provided guidance on collaborative tools for improving the representation of children and perinatal patients in AI-powered medical devices.

Moving the field forward

Early adopters of AI at Children’s National shared applications already under investigation, including efforts to segment and measure brain tumors on imaging, weigh the risk of strep throat with a smartphone camera and detect rheumatic heart disease with portable technology and an algorithm.

Dr. Linguraru, an expert in healthcare AI, said that artificial intelligence is no longer a hypothetical technology but is already remaking the healthcare system. “AI is here. What matters now is how we use it and how we train doctors to use it well,” he said.

The big picture

Through growing partnerships, Children’s National experts are teaming up with researchers at Virginia Tech on a series of AI-driven projects aimed at advancing pediatric health, including programs to rethink privacy in federated learning, forecast emergency department surges, extract clinical variables from documents to predict sepsis risks, identify rare genetic syndromes in children, and predict single-cell responses to genetic perturbations in pediatric developmental disorders.

Naren Ramakrishnan, Ph.D., director of the Sanghani Center at Virginia Tech and the Thomas L. Phillips Professor in the College of Engineering, said the partnership between the two academic centers is changing healthcare already and will continue to as the organizations offer future seed grants to support innovation in cardiology, neuroscience and oncology. “The roots have borne fruit,” he said.