Two new awards will help University of Michigan Biomedical Engineering Assistant Professor Joyce Yan-Ran Wang translate an emerging artificial intelligence framework into tools that could support complex clinical decisions. A one-year pilot grant from U-M’s new biomedical and bio-innovation institute, known as Unit X, and a Google Research Award will provide funding and advanced computing resources for Dr. Wang’s work on AI-empowered precision medicine. Wang said the smart patient retrieval project is a direct response to a paper published in March in Nature Reviews Cancer, in which she and co-authors advocated for this area as the future of precision medicine. Tumor boards bring together oncologists, radiologists, pathologists and other specialists to interpret evidence and recommend treatment, but as precision medicine advances, clinicians must consider increasingly complex combinations of medical images, pathology findings, molecular profiles, clinical records and treatment histories. In the Nature Reviews Cancer perspective, “AI-driven smart patient retrieval for precision oncology,” Wang and co-authors proposed systems that could search across these different types of data to identify previously treated patients who are clinically similar to a new patient, so clinicians could review those patients’ treatments, responses and long-term outcomes as additional evidence. Unlike keyword searches or rigid database filters, smart patient retrieval would use semantic, multimodal AI models to recognize clinically meaningful similarities distributed across several data sources, expanding upon a familiar form of clinical reasoning by drawing on collective experience beyond any individual clinician or institution.