Introducing the Duke Center for Computational and Digital Health Innovation

I’m excited to formally launch the Duke Center for Computational and Digital Health Innovation!

A smartwatch that can flag early signs of disease. A virtual reality system that helps surgeons practice complex procedures before the first incision. AI-powered models that suggest personalized treatments.

This is what the future of healthcare will look like — and we’re driving the research that makes it possible.

Our Center brings together engineers, basic scientists, clinicians, and more to revolutionize healthcare. We passionately believe that by collaborating where technology and healthcare meet, we can uniquely solve the most pressing issues in healthcare.

By focusing on our tenets — Find, Track, Treat — we cover all aspects of health. We seek to:

• Find: Detect emerging health issues through wearable technology and advanced analytics for earlier and more precise diagnosis
• Track: Develop better monitoring through AI, digital twins, and advanced sensors for more personalized care
• Treat: Improve treatment by integrating extended reality and digital twins with physics-based modeling and AI for better outcomes

The members of our community are pushing the edges of what’s possible in personalized medicine. We’re focused on three enabling technologies: wearable devices, high performance computing (HPC), and extended reality.

• Wearables and biosensors allow us critical and continuous access to patient data.
• HPC and physics-based modeling can simulate outcomes faster than ever before.
• Extended reality and generative AI allow us to visualize potential treatments.  

Members of our Center are already making an impact through their research. For example:

• Pranam Chatterjee and the Chatterjee Lab use HPC and generative AI to design therapeutics to treat diseases such as pediatric cancers and Huntington’s disease.
• Jessilyn Dunn and the Big Ideas Lab use wearables and computational tools to process masses of data into actionable health indicators, accessible in real time. 
• Cameron McIntyre and the McIntyre Lab develop advanced visual software to better understand complex neurosurgical procedures through holographic visualization technology and head-mounted displays.
• My lab, the Randles Lab, is dedicated to advancing biomedical research through innovative computational methods, aiming to improve human health. We use supercomputers to uncover disease mechanisms and support surgical planning through immersive environments.

Duke is built for this

Duke is the ideal place for the Center  — our engineers are literally across the street from the medical researchers, facilitating interaction. Researchers from across Duke — the Pratt School of Engineering, Duke School of Medicine, Duke School of Nursing, and Trinity School of Arts & Sciences — are using computational approaches to target problems in medicine.

At Duke, we can create an atmosphere where truly interdisciplinary work can be done, bringing together people and addressing the toughest healthcare challenges.   

Want to collaborate with us?

To advance innovation and collaboration, we’re focused on computational and digital health education. We host regular events, both in-person and virtual, that provide opportunities for our community to connect. We want people to understand how to use these new technologies.

If you’re a clinician, we want to help you know the nuances of how to deploy AI and the pros and cons of using the tools; engineers need to understand real-world scenarios and where the technology could be applied. We’re also trying to make the technology more usable for more people. If you’re a researcher, clinician, student, or industry partner, we encourage you to attend an event — become engaged and inspired!

I also encourage you to explore our new site to learn more about our approach and current research. Feel free to contact us with questions or comments!

Join us at the Center for Computational and Digital Health Innovation, where collaboration and cutting-edge technology meet to transform the future of medicine. I can’t wait for you to see what we do next!

Amanda Randles, Ph.D., is Director of the Duke Center for Computational and Digital Health Innovation and Alfred Winborne Mordecai and Victoria Stover Mordecai Associate Professor of Biomedical Engineering at the Pratt School of Engineering.