Planning Grant: Engineering Research Center for Computing Yourself to be Better - Engineering for Revolutionizing Medical Decision-making (CYBER-MD)

University Of California-San Diego, La Jolla CA

Investigators

Abstract

The Planning Grants for Engineering Research Centers competition was run as a pilot solicitation within the ERC program. Planning grants are not required as part of the full ERC competition, but intended to build capacity among teams to plan for convergent, center-scale engineering research. Improving the quality and efficiency of healthcare - at home, in long-term care facilities, and in hospitals - is becoming ever more important for patients and the society at large. Although the two current trends in healthcare - telemedicine and digital medicine - are making headway, they only scratch the surface of the problem as opposed to dealing with the root cause. To revolutionize healthcare delivery, we need a comprehensive biophysical patient model, namely a "digital twin", that fuses data streams, doctor notes/assessments, and medical histories with a rigorous computational engine that can make probabilistic predictions of future patient health/well-being. Healthcare providers will then be able to integrate traditional knowledge/training with the "data-to-decision" posture of the digital twin, while working with the patient, to best assess their health, evaluate options, predict future health, and optimize patient outcomes and prognosis. The aim of this Planning Grant is to engage and converge a broad stakeholder community of engineers, data scientists, educators, artists, medical specialists, hospitals, consulting firms, digital health firms, and health and government agencies to openly discuss and identify the most urgent engineering research, education, and outreach gaps that need to be addressed for revolutionizing medical decision-making and personalized medicine. Once the ERC is established, the team will partner closely with stakeholders to identify current issues in medical care, design and build engineering solutions, and deploy these solutions in phases after careful assessment of their effectiveness. It is through these activities that truly personalized medicine will be achieved, where cyber-physical healthcare monitoring can be tailored to specific patients as they are identified early at risk versus when severe complications unfold. Furthermore, the education and outreach initiatives of the CYBER-MD ERC will actively recruit women, underrepresented, and economically disadvantaged individuals for research and training future generations of multidisciplinary, convergent scientists and engineers. Healthcare practice today only provides clinicians with limited amounts of historic patient data, and doctors tend to rely on outdated training and anecdotal experiences to best care for their patients. However, given the broad overlap in symptomatology across various diseases, missed diagnosis and misdiagnosis remains a major problem. The vision of the CYBRE-MD ERC is to establish a cyber-physical innovation hub, where engineering breakthroughs in bio-physical modeling, imaging, sensing, data science, data visualization, and probabilistic risk assessment methodologies collectively revolutionize the medical diagnostic/treatment process for improving patient outcomes. The cornerstone of this concept is a "digital twin" that is born and then evolves with the patient while constantly being updated over time with new data streams ranging from biometrics to illness/injury assessments to diagnostic images/results to subsequent treatments. The digital twin not only presents a new data architecture for storing patient health informatics, but it also provides transformative health assessment and predictive analytic capabilities that enable doctors and patients to work together to improve patient health, well-being, and outcomes. CYBER-MD is inherently transdisciplinary and spans the entire spectrum of science, technology, engineering, arts, and mathematics (STEAM) as well as all branches of medicine. This Planning Grant will convene diverse experts to converge on a final strategic implementation, define focused research grand challenges, identify relevant thematic areas, communicate with stakeholders, educate, devise innovative and broadly implementable education/outreach efforts, and assemble the most competent and diverse team that underpins this transdisciplinary NSF ERC. The activities planned directly support convergent research, which is of utmost necessity for tackling this overarching grand challenge that spans the fields of STEAM, medicine, healthcare, and public health/well-being. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.