Artificial Intelligence for Health: ITU and WHO Call for Proposals

The Focus Group on 'AI for Health' (FG-AI4H ) issued a Call for Proposals (CfP) to identify compelling use cases of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in strengthening health services and overarching health systems. The ITU (International Telecommunications Union) FG-AI4H is a collaboration with the WHO (World Health Organization).

With a nearly 20 million health worker shortage worldwide, AI-based decision support can help with early detection, better diagnosis and risk identification, reduce the cost of treatment, support self-management, and improve outcomes. However, a common vetted framework for assessment and benchmarking of AI-based solutions is needed, founded on open source, open data and open standards. The Focus Group was created in July 2018 to address this challenge with their first meeting in September at the WHO Headquarters in Geneva.

The FG-AI4H CfP is an immediate outcome of the first meeting. The CfP is soliciting AI use cases and associated datasets in the fields of clinical and public health. Thomas Wiegand, Executive Director of the Fraunhofer Heinrich Hertz Institute HHI and Professor at TU Berlin, as Focus Group Chair states, “The Focus Group plans to establish a framework and associated processes for the performance evaluation of AI algorithms in health. This will be a complicated and challenging task; one we will undertake step-by-step, beginning with this first Call for Proposals.”