Founded in 2019 the Institute for Artificial Intelligence in Medicine (IKIM) brings together researchers from a number of disciplines to perform research, improve patient care and innovate training of tomorrow’s physicians. The institute is part of the University Medicine Essen and the University of Duisburg-Essen.

Integrating clinical applications, lab-based research, information technology and computer science, the institute conducts applied and foundational research. We cover a range of topics, including understanding and reasoning about medical data (including clinical reports, medical imagery, genome data) for e.g. understanding oncologically relevant patterns in large and complex data, understanding molecular disease mechanisms for e.g. (skin-)cancer, and deciphering the role of the microbiome in health and disease for e.g. viral infection or sepsis.

The institute is constituted by a number of research groups and junior research groups. We use and devise a wide range of cutting-edge methods, including but not limited to, reproducible bioinformatics pipelines, virtual and augmented reality, machine learning (e.g. federated learning, explainable AI), medical data warehousing, viral and bacterial genome sequencing, analysis of wastewater to predict future infection, computer vision, single cell DNA sequencing, natural language understanding and sensor processing.

To achieve these ambitious goals we develop solutions that can be used by clinicians, hospital staff, and researchers.

The institute works towards a more individualized, targeted and sustainable future of medical care. At the University of Duisburg-Essen, in the heart of the Ruhr area, our goals are to motivate, personalize, network.

The institute provides a research computing infrastructure to be used with de-identified medical and environmental data.