Sandeep Bodduluri, Ph.D..
Artificial intelligence (AI) is poised to revolutionize medical practice, and assistant professor Sandeep Bodduluri, Ph.D., will ensure UAB’s pulmonary physicians are ready for this transformation.
Bodduluri leads two courses (Foundations of AI in Medicine and Applications of AI in Medicine) for a new graduate certificate program, Artificial Intelligence in Medicine, to provide doctors with foundational knowledge on AI’s practical and ethical uses in medicine.
“We want clinicians to be able to understand fundamental concepts of AI and be able to lead teams of AI engineers and data scientists,” Bodduluri says.
The benefits of using AI in pulmonary medicine have been seen with AI-based patient monitoring, which can help pulmonologists note wheezes, snoring, coughs, and crackles when patients are at home, at work, or asleep1. With Surya Bhatt, M.D.’s lung imaging lab, Bodduluri has developed an AI-based screening tool to diagnose COPD directly from CT scans2. The team has also demonstrated the utility of spirometry beyond COPD diagnosis, by applying AI algorithms to detect CT-derived structural disease directly from spirometry curves3.
This makes understanding AI a priority for clinicians and researchers, and instruction in this emerging technology is a vital learning mandate.
“COPD, cystic fibrosis, and lung cancer are among the diseases most able to use AI methodologies for early disease examination and detection,” Bodduluri said. “Additionally, CT and micro-CT scans can be processed and used to develop diagnostics and processing workflows much more effectively and efficiently with AI than by human examination alone.”
The certificate requires five courses, two of which Bodduluri teaches. The courses currently take 18 months to complete. All courses are hybrid, delivered on weekday evenings to accommodate the typical work hours of medical professionals. Bodduluri is designing a curriculum to facilitate graduate certification into a stand-alone master’s degree for AI in Medicine. To learn more about the AI in Medicine Graduate Certificate, visit the Marnix E. Heersink Institute for Biomedical Innovation website.
1. Kraman SS, Pasterkamp H, Wodicka GR. Smart Devices Are Poised to Revolutionize the Usefulness of Respiratory Sounds. Chest. 2023 Jun;163(6):1519-1528. doi: 10.1016/j.chest.2023.01.024. Epub 2023 Jan 25. PMID: 36706908.
2. Amudala Puchakayala PR, Sthanam VL, Nakhmani A, Chaudhary MFA, Kizhakke Puliyakote A, Reinhardt JM, Zhang C, Bhatt SP, Bodduluri S. Radiomics for Improved Detection of Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease in Low-Dose and Standard-Dose Chest CT Scans. Radiology. 2023 Jun;307(5):e222998. doi: 10.1148/radiol.222998. PMID: 37338355
3. Bodduluri S, Nakhmani A, Reinhardt JM, Wilson CG, McDonald ML, Rudraraju R, Jaeger BC, Bhakta NR, Castaldi PJ, Sciurba FC, Zhang C, Bangalore PV, Bhatt SP. Deep neural network analyses of spirometry for structural phenotyping of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. JCI Insight. 2020 Jul 9;5(13):e132781. doi: 10.1172/jci.insight.132781. PMID: 32554922