JAIC Mission Initiative in the Spotlight: Warfighter Health

The Warfigher Health Mission Initiative, a project of the Department of Defense Joint Artificial Intelligence, is developing AI solutions to advance the cutting edge of military healthcare. Led by U.S. Navy Captain Hassan Tetteh, a veteran military doctor and surgeon, the team is harnessing medical innovations through AI.

“It’s a fantastic experience to be in the room where senior DoD leaders are getting behind healthcare and the medical community, saying, ‘We are going to invest and advance AI medical solutions, because we see health as a strategic priority for the U.S. military.’”

– Mark Beckner, Warfighter Health MI Team

As a result, any standards, processes, systems, and best practices developed within the JCF will be repeatable for other AI projects, providing an exponential increase in productivity and mission enhancement over time and allowing the DoD to deploy AI capabilities more rapidly and at scale.

Products:

The Warfighter Health team is currently working on an improved Integrated Disability Evaluation System model, which helps reduce wait times for service members undergoing disability evaluation, and the AI-Augmented Realty Enhanced Pathology Decision Support model. For the latter model, the team is advancing an initiative to digitize more than 55 million pathology slides for medical research to create algorithms that help identify different types of diseases. Warfighter Health centers its projects and activities around five main goals: accelerate health status classifications for readiness and disabilities; accelerate and improve diagnosis to enable population-wide inferences; improve warfighter survival and lethality; improve and build public-private partnerships; and positively change the course of modern medicine by preventing suffering and saving lives.

Successes:

The team recently launched the JAIC Medical Artificial Intelligence Network. The MAIN is an online community designed to inform, engage, and empower users in medical communities across the DoD, academia, and industry. Users can share their ideas, identify problems, discuss solutions to existing problems, and update community members on their individual projects. Currently, all Warfighter Health projects fall under three distinct project development lines: Combat Medicine, Warfighter Readiness, and Human Performance, with several projects in execution.

Stay tuned to the “AI in Defense Blog” to learn more about the JAIC’s Warfighter Health mission initiative.