March 21, 2023 — Learners, trainees and faculty at the College of Medicine will soon have the opportunity to get into the nitty-gritty process of developing their own code to create artificial intelligence algorithms that would improve medical research as part of an upcoming course.

Course II: A Basic Understanding of Coding for AI in Medicine is expected to be available to students, trainees and faculty at the College of Medicine by the end of April, with attendees at the college’s upcoming AI4Health conference in Orlando getting a special first look at the course’s early modules. Last year, more than 1,000 college affiliates enrolled in the first course on the fundamentals of artificial intelligence terminology and applications in medicine.

“Course II gets into the technical skills and builds upon what is introduced in course I,” said Francois Modave, Ph.D., a professor of AI in the department of anesthesiology and one of the developers of the college’s AI curriculum, along with colleagues Christopher Giordano, M.D., chief of the division of liver and transplant anesthesiology and a professor of anesthesiology, and Patrick Tighe, M.D., M.S., the associate dean for AI application and innovation and the Donn M. Dennis, M.D., Professor in Anesthetic Innovation. “Course II really allows people who are interested in building their own models and who want to incorporate machine learning into their research to get their hands dirty.”

Modave said the new course will focus on programming and coding in the Python language, with four hands-on modules that may take participants approximately five to six hours to complete. The course build upon key algorithms discussed in course I — including logistic regression, support vector machines and random forests — to show how physicians can develop those algorithms and apply them to their own research. Tighe is also leading the development of an additional course that focuses on deep learning algorithms as they apply to image analysis, an important component of interpreting results obtained by AI algorithms.

Like the College of Medicine’s popular AI fundamentals course, the second course will include several modules that contain six- to eight-minute videos and other multimedia elements like animated graphics, created through collaboration with the UF College of Education.

“A major focus on this module is ‘demystifying code,’ pulling back the curtain on this historically very niche skill,” Giordano said. “This is really designed to be engaging for everyone.”