Digital medicine

$15 million to develop, assess AI for breast cancer detection and risk

How can we improve the early detection of breast cancer and better identify women who have higher risk for an advanced or second breast cancer and who need additional screening?

That’s the mission of a national research team co-led by UC Davis Professor and Division Chief of Biostatistics Diana Miglioretti, Ph.D. Thanks to a $15 million, five-year grant renewal from the National Cancer Institute, the team will use artificial intelligence (AI) to make screening and surveillance more accurate and equitable.

Miglioretti and her team started studying and promoting safer and more personalized breast cancer screening in 2011, and advanced the science of risk-based screening and surveillance in many ways. The team is now looking to integrate imaging features and AI algorithms to improve risk prediction. The grant will fund three new projects:

• Using AI to predict which women with no history of breast cancer are at high risk of being diagnosed with advanced cancer.
• Exploring whether use of AI detection scores and other facility-level interventions (such as mobile mammography) can improve outcomes, with special attention to health equity.
• Developing a risk-based approach to identify women at higher risk of surveillance failure, by examining multiple factors that might be linked to failures.

The program leverages the Breast Cancer Surveillance Consortium, a nationwide research network with data from geographically and socio-demographically diverse settings.

Digital pilot provides overdose surveillance for local counties

UC Davis Health and its Digital CoLab innovation hub have partnered with the CDC Foundation and Boston Children’s Hospital on a pilot program called SMART Cumulus. The digital platform allows health care and research institutions to more easily exchange data with public health sites, allowing them to share the disease burden.

For the program’s first application, the organizations created an opioid overdose surveillance dashboard for Sacramento County Public Health and the Yolo County Health and Human Services Agency, allowing public health officials to track across counties.

The program enables streaming of data formats in a secure, privacy-preserving environment for faster execution of multi-site studies for population health initiatives. AI analyzes clinical notes and longitudinal medical histories; public health partners can then view dashboards populated with aggregate, de-identified data and perform analytics.

In addition to overdoses, other participating public health organizations are using the platform to track COVID-19, hypertension, mental health and diabetes.

New collaboration offers personalized treatment for asthma + COPD

UC Davis Health and Propeller Health have announced a new collaboration that will offer personalized treatment for high-risk patients with asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD).

UC Davis Health will provide the Propeller remote monitoring program, which includes sensors and an app/web portal, to eligible patients. The sensors attach to a patient’s inhaler and capture unique signals that record events, such as medication usage or respiration, transmitting the data to UC Davis Health’s electronic health record to support remote monitoring.

The collaboration is a project of the UC Davis Health Operations Center of Excellence, a partnership between Innovation Technology and Clinical Operations. In 2022, UC Davis’ Comprehensive COPD Clinic also created the first remote patient monitoring program in the Sacramento region for high-risk patients with COPD.