NEW YORK (GenomeWeb) – New precision medicine firm Flow Health announced today that it has formed a five-year partnership with the US Department of Veterans Affairs to use artificial intelligence techniques to improve healthcare.
The company is working to build what it calls a "medical knowledge graph" that it hopes will inform more precise care for patients based on artificial intelligence-based analyses of genotypic and phenotypic data. In collaboration with the VA, Flow Health said it plans to collect over 30 petabytes of longitudinal clinical and genomic data drawn from VA records on 22 million veterans spanning over 20 years.
"To build artificial intelligence you need huge amounts of data to feed deep learning models," Flow Health Chief Medical Officer Robert Rowley said in a statement, adding that the partnership with the VA, and the wealth of data that it entails, is a crucial step for the company.
Overall, Flow Health hopes that it can create an AI-based medical decision-making system that can help clinicians pinpoint effective treatments and identify possible side effects more effectively than current models.
The VA also signed a precision oncology agreement today with the Prostate Cancer Foundation to expand clinical research among veterans and speed up the development of treatments and cures for prostate cancer. As part of the agreement, the VA will make data from its more than 9 million anonymized veterans' medical records available to researchers studying the disease.