Silicon Valley Teams Up with Medical Center to Create AI Solutions for Healthcare

The Mayo Clinic, a nonprofit medical center based in Rochester, Minnesota, announced Monday that it is partnering with Silicon Valley startup Cerebras Systems to develop artificial intelligence models for the healthcare industry.

The Mayo Clinic, which has three major campuses in the United States in addition to the United Kingdom and the United Arab Emirates, uses Cerebras’ chips and systems to tap decades of anonymized patient data and information to develop its own AI models.

Matthew Callstrom, Mayo’s chief medical strategy officer and chairman of its radiology department, said some models can read and write text to, for example, summarize the most important parts of a new patient’s lengthy medical history. Other models can look for patterns in images that the human eyes of trained medical experts may not detect, or analyze genomic data. Systems don’t make medical decisions themselves – doctors still do.

“How do you make the right decision for each patient? You have to weigh all these factors, you have to have a lot of experience. That’s where artificial intelligence comes in to augment that,” Callstrom said in an interview.

Mayo plans to make the results of its work with Cerebras available on its Mayo Clinic Platform, which is also used by Mercy Health System in the United States, University Health Network in Canada, and systems in Brazil and Israel.

Callstrom said Mayo has not yet decided how much it will charge for the AI technology. The clinic was set to unveil the new venture in a speech at the JPMorgan Chase Healthcare Conference in San Francisco.

Cerebras CEO Andrew Feldman said the deal was a “multi-million dollar” contract over several years, but declined to provide further details. Cerbras, one of several AI chips starting to challenge market leader Nvidia, will provide both hardware and software development services to Mayo under the agreement.