A UF College of Medicine research team launched a six-month pilot award study in February that applies AI to brain tumor research. The team will investigate MRI imaging to improve predictions of how the immune systems of brain tumor patients respond to therapies.
The grant from UF Health’s Preston A. Wells, Jr. Center for Brain Tumor Therapy was awarded to team leader Yonghui Wu, Ph.D., and to co-investigators Cheng Peng, Ph.D. and Ashley Ghiaseddin, MD, a brain cancer specialist in the Department of Neurosurgery. Wu and Peng are faculty members in the Department of Health Outcomes and Biomedical Informatics (HOBI).
By August the team plans to build and test an AI model using multiple Large Language Models. After success, they would apply for a larger grant from the National Cancer Institute’s Specialized Programs of Research Excellence (SPORE).
This translational research study’s title is “Multimodal Artificial Intelligence to Advance Immunotherapy Treatment Response for Brain Tumor.”
Second Award with Wu
Wu is also a co-investigator on a brain health pilot project spearheaded by David Clark, Sc.D., the chief of research at the VA North Florida/South Georgia Healthcare System and Professor in the UF Department of Neurology.
The project is called “Building a VA/UF Data Science Core for Brain Health.” This collaboration of the VA with UF intends to create a secure method for processing large amounts of brain health data. This data resource will support research on traumatic brain injuries and treatments for dementia and other brain disorders.
The $50,000 pilot project is funded by Florida’s Brain and Spinal Cord Injury Trust Fund and administered by UF’s BRAIN Center. Learn more about the project in the announcement BRAIN Center Announces 2026 “Big Ideas” Award Recipients.
