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Empowering Health Care with Transformative AI
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is revolutionizing every major industry, and healthcare is at the forefront of this transformation. At UTHealth Houston, AI is being leveraged to enhance patient care, advance disease prevention, and drive biomedical innovation. Our researchers, students, and faculty are actively developing and applying cutting-edge AI tools to solve real-world healthcare challenges.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) refers to machines simulating human intelligence through various techniques. Key approaches include statistical machine learning, which uses mathematical models to identify patterns and make predictions; deep learning, inspired by neural networks in the human brain, enabling advanced tasks like image and speech recognition; and generative AI, capable of creating new content such as text, images, and music. These methods, among others, collectively power AI's ability to adapt, learn, and innovate across countless applications.
External ModelsThese external models are integrated with our AI Hub’s backend systems to provide broad access to state-of-the-art large language models for testing, education, and research purposes. Our internal educational tool is designed primarily for students, faculty, and staff at UTHealth Houston, enabling them to interactively explore advanced language AI and develop a deeper understanding of its capabilities and limitations. The tool helps users experiment with different models, compare performance or responses on academic and healthcare topics, and supports hands-on learning in courses, seminars, and self-guided exploration.
The Chatbot Arena Leaderboard is a platform that ranks large language models (LLMs) based on user preferences and benchmark evaluations.
Meta introduced Llama 4, an open-source large language model (LLM) built for multimodal AI, outperforming previous Llama models in reasoning, coding, and vision tasks.
Google has unveiled MedGemma, a family of open models built on Gemma 3 for medical text and image comprehension. It comes in three variants: a 4B multimodal, a 27B text-only, and a 27B multimodal model, designed to accelerate healthcare AI applications.
In June 2025, Mistral AI released Mistral Small 3.2-24B Instruct, a next-generation model optimized for efficiency and instruction-following across text and multimodal tasks.
OpenAI has introduced Whisper Large-v3-Turbo, an optimized version of their Whisper Large-v3 model, designed to enhance automatic speech recognition (ASR) and translation tasks.
HighlightsNotebookLM AI Research Assistant
In December 2025, UTHealth Houston faculty, staff, and students gained access to Google’s NotebookLM—an AI-powered research and productivity tool—through UTH-Share for accounts designated as non-protected health information (non-PHI). NotebookLM combines note-taking with large language model capabilities, allowing users to upload or link Google Docs, PDFs, and pasted text, then ask the system to explain concepts, summarize content, compare sources, and generate study guides, outlines, FAQs, and other structured materials. All responses are grounded only in the content stored inside the user’s notebook and include citations back to the original sources.
NotebookLM is available only to users whose UTH-Share accounts are configured as non-PHI. PHI-restricted users must first purge protected health information from their UTH-Share account, complete the required attestation, and switch their configuration to a non-PHI account before accessing NotebookLM. Google states that files uploaded to NotebookLM are not used to train global AI models and remain private within each user’s notebook. For assistance with configuration or access, users can contact the IT Solution Center at 713-486-4848.
AI-Powered Lecture Translation
In August 2025, researchers at UTHealth Houston’s McWilliams School of Biomedical Informatics developed an AI program to translate Dr. James Grotta’s lecture on IV thrombolysis and acute stroke treatment directly into Spanish. This shows the transformative power of AI in breaking language barriers, expanding access to critical medical knowledge, and supporting broader communities with life-saving insights.
Partnership with OpenAI
In September 2024, UTHealth Houston collaborated with OpenAI to integrate AI technology into health care and education while ensuring compliance with privacy regulations such as HIPAA and FERPA. This initiative provides the university community with access to OpenAI's ChatGPT Education tool, aiming to develop safe and trusted solutions to enhance patient experiences, drive innovative research, and streamline operations.
Generative AI Workshop
In May 2024, the McWilliams School of Biomedical Informatics hosted the inaugural "Generative AI Now!" workshop. The event attracted leaders from the Houston area and the Texas Medical Center, focusing on leveraging AI to revolutionize patient care, research, and operational efficiency.
Significant Grant Awards
Between August and October 2023, researchers at the McWilliams School of Biomedical Informatics secured over $31 million in grants across 16 projects centered on medical AI innovations. These projects aim to advance informatics research and highlight the growing role of technology in medicine.
AI Initiatives at UTHealth HoustonThe Center for Translational AI Excellence and Applications in Medicine (TEAM-AI) focuses on accelerating the translation of AI innovations in biomedicine and healthcare. The Center consists of faculty members, program managers/coordinators, data scientists, and scientific programmers.
The Center for Secure Artificial Intelligence For Healthcare (SAFE) at McWilliams School of Biomedical Informatics focuses on harmonizing methodologies in computer science, applied mathematics, biostatistics, chemistry, and pharmacology to facilitate biomedical data research and discovery.
The mission of the Center for Artificial Intelligence and Genome Informatics (AIGI) is to develop a methodological and applied informatics research program to model the intrinsic structural connections among modern data modalities in biomedical research.
The Institute for Stroke and Cerebrovascular Diseases is exploring the cutting-edge intersection of healthcare and artificial intelligence to evolutionize stroke care, diagnosis, and research, leading the way in enhancing patient outcomes and advancing medical science.
With a focus on the development, instruction, and execution of technologies for patients and health care professionals, the UTHealth Houston Center for Digital Healthcare Innovation is revolutionizing the future of digital medicine within our community.
The Office of Data Science at UTHealth Houston creates digital ecosystems to advance care, research, and education. By partnering with clinicians and researchers, it builds disease-specific registries, custom EMRs, and AI tools to support a Learning Healthcare System.
The Space Medicine Fellowship program is charting the course for the future of human spaceflight. Fellows have begun working with McWilliams School of Biomedical Informatics to integrate AI technologies into the field of space medicine.
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