The Center for the Advancement of Medical AI
Leading Innovation in Medical AI
NGRF’s Center for the Advancement of Medical AI (CAMAI) leads the charge in healthcare innovation by uniting top-tier expertise in medical imaging AI and large language models. With a renowned imaging scientist and a senior LLM expert under one roof, as well as the rest of the powerful data science resources at NGRF, CAMAI offers a uniquely collaborative environment for developing diagnostic systems that detect subtle pathologies and generate actionable clinical reports with unmatched precision. This integration of disciplines accelerates the translation of research into practical tools—enhancing diagnostic accuracy, reducing interpretation time, and improving patient care. By bridging traditionally siloed domains, CAMAI is setting new standards in AI-augmented healthcare. Our vision is to pioneer collaborative, cutting-edge AI research that uncovers disease processes, deepens understanding, and transforms outcomes.
Leading with Vision and Expertise
Center Director
Nick Schaub, PhD
Dr. Schaub is an interdisciplinary AI research scientist focusing on applications in biology and medicine. His most recent work, Ask AIthena, is part of the National AI Research Resource (NAIRR) pilot program — a large language model (LLM) retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) model that aims to accelerate science by giving AI access to all scientific and medical texts (currently 250 million texts). In addition to his LLM work, Dr. Schaub applies AI for computer vision at scale, using AI models to analyze hundreds of terabytes to petabytes of biological data for drug discovery.
Prior to his work in AI, Dr. Schaub engaged in neuroscience and materials research to create materials for nerve regeneration, stimulation, and drug delivery. He holds patents for the use of AI in stem cell biomanufacturing and polymeric drug delivery devices. His current interests focus on large-scale applications of AI to science and medicine — specifically around making data AI-accessible in order to discover links between knowledge found in data and that found in the literature.
Academic Collaboration: The NGRF maintains an academic collaboration with Dr. Craig Jones, founder and former director of CAMAI, now at the University of Alberta. Dr. Jones is a recognized expert in medical and medical imaging AI applications, with extensive experience in developing and implementing advanced computational and AI methods for modalities such as MRI, CT, ultrasound, and ocular imaging.
CAMAI Mission: To develop cutting-edge AI technology for medical applications, driven by rigorous methodologies and strong collaborations to empower physicians and AI researchers to revolutionize healthcare.
CAMAI Vision: To pioneer collaborative, groundbreaking medical AI methods and applications to uncover disease processes, expand medical understanding, and improve patient outcomes.
Our Research Labs
NGRF is an actively collaborative environment where researchers with diverse specialties, training, and interests work together to solve intractable problems. We have built out some labs around our general research areas of interest – but our work isn’t limited by these areas, and all researchers in our labs and centers are proactively interdisciplinary in their work.
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The AI Imaging Lab
Explore how we’re building the next generation of AI-powered imaging tools.
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The Large Language Model Lab
Explore how we’re transforming language models into lifesaving tools.