The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) has signed a five-year deal with San Francisco, CA-based Flow Health to build a medical knowledge graph with deep learning to inform medical decision-making and train artificial intelligence (AI) to personalize care plans. Flow Health is building the world’s largest knowledge graph of medicine and genomics from over 30 petabytes of longitudinal clinical data drawn from VA records on 22 million veterans spanning over 20 years. All patient information will be de-identified during analysis to protect privacy.
The goal of the five year deal is to understand the common elements that make certain people susceptible to particular diseases, pinpointing effective treatments and identifying possible side effects in order to inform care decisions. The collaboration will integrate large volumes of data and aims to discover relationships between genomes and phenotypes — to learn what every gene variant actually means, to identify disease risk, to make more precise diagnoses, and to suggest individualized treatments.
“Developing artificial intelligence which can automatically identify the best diagnostic and treatment pathways will assist clinicians in delivering precision medicine to every veteran,” said Robert Rowley, MD, Chief Medical Officer at Flow Health in a statement. “To build artificial intelligence you need huge amounts of data to feed deep learning models. This is why this partnership between the VA and Flow Health is a watershed moment for deep learning in healthcare.”
Flow Health believes that artificial intelligence will bring unmatched benefits to healthcare by using deep learning to analyze medical data will help dramatically improve detection, diagnosis, treatment — and prevention — of disease.