UT Austin is betting that the future of medicine involves artificial intelligence.
On Monday, the university launched its Center for Computational Medicine, a lab that will specialize in using AI to create digital models that aid in the diagnosis and treatment of diseases. The center is a collaboration between Dell Medical School and UT’s Oden Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences.
Heading up the new lab is Charles "Charley" Taylor, a former bioengineering professor at Stanford University and the creator of HeartFlow, a technology that uses computer simulation to aid in the diagnosis of heart disease.
“I felt like a kid going to school for the first time when I showed up for my first day here,” Taylor said, Zooming in from campus on Monday.
Just two days prior, he had arrived from California at his new downtown Austin apartment.
“I've done a lot of really wonderful and exciting things in my career so far, but I feel like being here at this time, at this place, is an opportunity to really create something that … will be a tremendous benefit to the people who live in Austin, and to the state of Texas, to the country and to the world,” he said.

Under Taylor’s leadership, the new center will include a focus on developing “digital twins,” or computer representations of a patient’s anatomy, by applying artificial intelligence to medical imaging. This allows doctors not only to visualize a patient’s organs and symptoms, but also to model various treatment options.
“The idea with the digital twin is you can test alternate treatment strategies out on a digital representation of the patient, see what might work best, and then use that information to go forward with what you consider at that time to be a better treatment strategy,” Taylor said.
The Center for Computational Medicine will build on existing programs and technologies geared toward computational modeling at UT Austin, including the Center for Computational Oncology. UT also houses the fastest supercomputer in any academic setting worldwide.
"There's a immense amount of computational AI, machine learning, things like that here at UT," said Dr. William Matsui, the vice dean of research for Dell Medical School. "The application where you take things like AI and now apply them to medicine, that's a challenge everywhere. Part of it is ... how do you do it where it's ethical and safe?"
As AI has become more common in medical settings, so too have discussions of ethical issues — such as how to eliminate bias in AI decision-making applications.
The World Health Organization has said AI technology holds "great promise" for improvements in medical diagnosis, treatment and research, but that it must center "ethics and human rights at the heart of its design, deployment, and use." WHO specifically called for caution before using large language learning models such as Chat GPT in health care settings.
Taylor said that AI, when appropriately integrated to health care, should be thought of as a tool in a physician's toolkit.
"It's not going to replace the judgment of a physician," he said. "It won't be able to synthesize and integrate information the way a brain can, the way a trained physician can — for the foreseeable future, in my estimation. But it will be a tool, and probably an increasingly powerful tool."
Taylor said he is already seeing the medical community embrace AI and computational modeling through technologies like HeartFlow, which has been used by more than 250,000 patients. But he is excited about the potential for the university to incorporate these technologies from the ground up as it builds its forthcoming academic medical center.
“I think it's going to be a model for hospitals for the future,” Taylor said. “UT is very uniquely positioned to do this, and Austin as a city, I think will become a hub for digital healthcare.”
Dr. Matsui said the timing of the university's investment in a new medical research center would make it possible for the institution to adopt cutting-edge technology quickly, as opposed to established hospitals that would need to replace resources and techniques. He believes that will elevate Austin’s profile as a medical destination, even among larger Texas cities like Houston and Dallas.
“I think we will leapfrog a lot of other places, if we're correct and we do it right,” Matsui said. “Instead of sort of doing the same thing and trying to catch up with those other places, let's just leap ahead to where we think the future is going to be.”