WCM-Q’s inaugural Dean’s Distinguished Lecture Series focuses on AI and healthcare

Doha, Qatar: Dr. Javaid I. Sheikh, dean of Weill Cornell Medicine Qatar (WCM Q), recently hosted the inaugural Dean s Distinguished Lecture Series eve...

Doha, Qatar: Dr. Javaid I. Sheikh, dean of Weill Cornell Medicine-Qatar (WCM-Q), recently hosted the inaugural Dean’s Distinguished Lecture Series event, which focused on artificial intelligence (AI) and healthcare. Dr. Rainu Kaushal, a distinguished US-based data scientist and health services researcher, led the session.

Dr. Kaushal’s lecture focused on how AI is dominating the healthcare IT landscape, how it is created and being implemented across various areas of healthcare, including imaging, and how health systems can meaningfully capture the vast quantities of clinical data that is required for research.

Other key topics included the importance of ensuring guidance and regulations that govern the ethical use of AI in healthcare and the significance of investments driving the generation, implementation, and meaningful use of novel AI technologies.

Dr. Kaushal is the senior associate dean of clinical research, chair of the Department of Population Health Sciences, and the Nanette Laitman Distinguished Professor of Population Health Sciences at Weill Cornell Medicine (WCM). She is also the physician-in-chief of population health sciences at New York-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center. As the principal investigator of INSIGHT Clinical Research Network (CRN), Dr. Kaushal has built the US’s largest urban clinical database of 22 million patients with trillions of medical, biological, and social data points integrated for national research use.

During his introductory note, Dr. Javaid Sheikh, dean of WCM-Q, said: “It is truly a momentous time in healthcare when multiple scientific streams—computational biology, data science,  artificial intelligence, and population health sciences—are converging. The landscape of healthcare is being transformed to  enhance  healthspans, to  spawn  an  era  of  precision  health,  to  get  people  involved  in  taking  care  of  their  own  health,  and  to  add  life  to  years  and  years  to  life.”