Mayo Clinic Collaborates With Startup Cerebras Systems For AI Development In Health

Mayo Clinic, a non-profit medical center based in Minnesota, announced on Monday January 8, that it will be working with Silicon Valley startup Cerebras Systems to develop artificial intelligence (AI) models for the health industry.

The Mayo Clinic, which has three main campuses in the United States as well as locations in the UK and United Arab Emirates, will use chips and computing systems from Cerebras to access decades of data and anonymized medical records to develop their own AI models.

Matthew Callstrom, Mayo Medical Director for Strategy and Head of the Radiology Department, stated that some models will be able to read and write text to do things like summarize the most important part of a long medical record for new patients.

Other models will be able to trace images for patterns that may not be detected by human eyes who are medical experts or to analyze genome data. The system will not make medical decisions - it will still be made by doctors.

"How do you make the right decisions for each patient? You have to weigh all those factors, you have to have a lot of experience. That's where artificial intelligence begins to play a role in starting to strengthen that," Callstrom said in an interview.

Mayo plans to make the result of their collaboration with Cerebras will eventually be available at the Mayo Clinic Platform, a data network also used by the Mercy healthcare system in the United States, the University Health Network in Canada, along with systems in Brazil and Israel.

Callstrom said the Mayo had not yet decided how much it would cost the AI technology. The clinic plans to disclose this new effort during a speech at the JPMorgan Chase health conference in San Francisco.

Cerebras CEO Andrew Feldman said the deal was a "multi-million dollar" agreement for several years. But they declined to provide further details. Cerebras, one of several AI chip startups aimed at challenging market leader Nvidia, will provide a hardware and software development service to Mayo in this deal.