The University of Maryland, Baltimore County and UM Baltimore have partnered to pair medical research with AI, machine learning, and cybersecurity to protect medical devices and data from cyberattacks.
The University of Maryland, Baltimore and UM Baltimore County recently signed an agreement to leverage UMBC’s AI, machine learning, and cybersecurity experience to protect medical devices and data from cyberattacks.
The two campuses will also partner on furthering data-base medical research. To UMB Vice President of Clinical and Translational Research Stephen Davis, cybersecurity must be part of all clinical and research projects.
While UMB’s expertise is in the medical expertise, Bruce Jarrell, MD, executive vice president, provost, and dean of the Graduate School explained UMBC is more focused on technology. By partnering, the campuses will strengthen the campuses and other agencies across the state.
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“It allows us to use the very broad data that we gather in delivering healthcare to ask research questions that perhaps we might not be able to ask in the past that would allow us to improve patient safety and advance our progress in cures,” Jarrell said in a state.
“The work that we’re about to do together is a very beautiful example of interdisciplinarity,” Philip Rous provost and senior vice president for academic affairs at UMBC, said in a statement. “It is centered around bringing together experts, faculty, students with deep knowledge in different areas or perhaps different disciplines essentially to address, solve a problem, advance, innovate.”
UMBC will provide critical capabilities through core resources to UMBC’s Institute for Clinical and Translational Research (ICTR), led by Davis.
The partnership will also create a Cybersecurity and Artificial Intelligence Core, which will enable the research team to design machine learning models to analyze large data sets and determine whether any data could be collected to improve analysis, while helping to uncover and overcome possible cybersecurity risks related to devices and or systems.
Notably, the UMB-UMBC partnership will also lend its support to the Baltimore hub of the NIH-funded Clinical and Translational Science Award (CTDA). Officials said UMB joined Johns Hopkins University in the spring on a five-year grant meant to “improve the translational process, getting more treatments to patients more quickly.”
“It’s broader than cybersecurity,” Karl Steiner, vice president for research at UMBC, said in a statement. “Part of it is defense and part of it is scientific offense.”
Security leaders have long stressed that the healthcare sector should lean on outside resources and collaborate to fill cybersecurity gaps.
The Institute for Critical Infrastructure Technology recently told Sen. Mark Warner, D-Virginia: “Meaningful collaboration has proven one of the most under-utilized, cost-effective, and impactful strategies organizations can engage to mitigate hyper-evolving cyber threats. Threat sharing initiatives allow for stronger data protection and more importantly, for proactive deterrence options instead of reactive remediation efforts.”
The UMB-UMBC partnership should create a frame of reference for how to successfully accomplish common security goals, while fueling medical research and patient care.
Date: August 20, 2019
Source: HealthITSecurity