Weaving artificial intelligence (AI) into the complex fabric of New York Eye and Ear Infirmary of Mount Sinai (NYEE) is undeniably a tall order. The process, which began in earnest several years ago, is now expected to pick up considerable steam with the creation of an Ophthalmic AI Clinical and Research Fellowship—among the first of its kind in the country—under the umbrella of the renamed Barry Family Center for Ophthalmic Artificial Intelligence and Human Health at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.
“The fellowship is a critical step in advancing NYEE’s strategic goals around AI and machine learning,” says Tak Yee Tania Tai, MD, Clinical Advisory Director of the Center, whose longtime relationship with the Barry family led to their generous gift in support of the fellowship and the new Center. “The one-year fellowship will help cultivate the next generation of clinician-researchers who can harness AI to improve diagnosis, streamline clinical workflows, and develop more personalized approaches to care. It also reinforces our institution’s role as a leader in innovation.”
As Co-Director of the Ophthalmic AI Fellowship, Dr. Tai will help direct its efforts, in part, toward the diagnosis and treatment of glaucoma, a strong interest of the Barry family. She also serves as a mentor to the inaugural AI fellow, Gal Jacob Cohen, MD, who recently finished a five-year residency at Sheba Tel HaShomer Medical Center in Israel. In this supportive role, Dr. Tai plans to help shape the fellowship into a robust learning experience through hands-on collaboration and research guidance.
Dr. Cohen, for his part, couldn’t be more anxious to start.
“I knew early in my career I wanted to work at the intersection of technology and medicine,” he says. When he learned from colleagues that NYEE had created a dedicated center for AI in ophthalmology, followed by a fellowship, he leapt at the opportunity. “I felt like it was a calling, something I really needed to do,” he recalls. “And I was only too willing to take a break in my surgical training at home to devote a year to the fellowship.”
Having arrived in New York in July with his wife and children, he is now getting his feet wet in what promises to be a very busy and challenging year ahead, combining clinical practice with cutting-edge research. One project he may take an active role in, for example, is leveraging AI to detect patients who progress rapidly to glaucoma, losing much of their visual field in a relatively short period and thus increasing their risk of blindness.
“Our new fellow will be working with others, including a bioinformatics specialist at The Charles Bronfman Institute for Personalized Medicine at the Icahn School of Medicine, to see if there are differences in the charts of a short list we have of fast glaucoma progressors versus those who are not,” says Louis R. Pasquale, MD, FARVO, Deputy Chair for Research and Co-Director of the Ophthalmic AI Fellowship and the Barry Family Center. “By using large language models, we may be able to discover, from chart information, patterns of glaucoma progression that are not evident to humans.”
Other potential projects for the fellow include developing AI algorithms for NYEE’s central retinal artery occlusion program, which identifies eye stroke from optical coherence tomography (OCT) images of patients who present at emergency rooms of Mount Sinai hospitals, and for its tele-retina program, where primary care providers use high-quality portable digital cameras to capture retinal images during annual patient exams.
In the year ahead, Dr. Cohen will also find himself many days in NYEE’s Retina Center and the David E. Marrus Adaptive Optics Imaging Laboratory under the guidance of Richard B. Rosen, MD, FARVO, Vice Chair of Ophthalmic Research at NYEE. As part of that learning experience, Dr. Rosen hopes to have the fellow collaborate with a group at the Joan and Irwin Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute that is looking to deploy the power of OCT angiography together with AI to shorten the time it takes researchers to identify the minute changes that occur in the microvasculature of the retina.
In terms of education, the new AI fellow will have abundant opportunities to serve as both a trainee and trainer. “AI literacy is something all of us need to learn, and we hope that the fellow will present a lecture to our staff on AI and its growing role within ophthalmology,” explains Dr. Pasquale. “AI has the potential to teach our doctors how to be better observers of pathologies that are often easy for us to miss, and that’s a message our AI fellow can hopefully drive home.”