Itzhak Zachi Attia, Ph.D., receives funding for upcoming project, Mayo Clinic Rochester

Itzhak Zachi Attia, Ph.D., Department of Cardiology at Mayo Clinic in Rochester, received funding for the project “Bias Detection and Removal from Signals and Images Using Synthetic Data Created by Visualizing Network Feature Selection with Generative Adversarial Networks (V-GANS)” from the Mayo Clinic Center for Digital Health Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning Enablement Awards. The awards in this program are delivered in partnership with the Office of Equity, Inclusion and Diversity and are funded as part of a grant from Dalio Philanthropies. The awards support projects that demonstrate how AI can be integrated into clinical practice to benefit health care professionals, patients and consumers in meaningful and measurable ways. The projects selected for 2023 promote the development and implementation of strategies to prevent or minimize the bias or social inequity that AI can introduce or reinforce. Dr. Zachi Attia’s project seeks to diversify existing AI datasets through synthetic data, reducing the need to collect extensive amounts of data from patients in underrepresented groups and streamlining Mayo Clinic’s path to incorporating more equitable data using generative models. Dr. Zachi Attia is an assistant professor of medicine in the Mayo Clinic College of Medicine and Science.