Fall 2025
By Alice Levitt 

Noninvasive brain stimulation at home for people suffering from depression. Artificial intelligence-based estimates for how much chemotherapy you’ll need. A wearable device to track a patient’s level of hydration.

These are just three of 19 groundbreaking projects currently active at the Digital Health Institute, a joint initiative between Rice University and Houston Methodist. By the time you read this, there will likely be more sprouting from the minds of doctors and engineers working in tandem.

“Harvard doesn’t have MIT. They don’t work together. Stanford doesn’t have MIT, but here in Houston, we have the equivalent of MIT. Rice biomedical engineering is one of the top 10 in the country, and we have Houston Methodist. So combining engineers with clinicians is a great model for innovation,” said Pothik Chatterjee, executive director of the DHI. 

“What we are aspiring to do is to change the rate at which innovation happens and especially gets adopted,” said Ashutosh Sabharwal, the Ernest Dell Butcher Professor of Engineering and professor of electrical and computer engineering, who worked with Khurram Nasir, Houston Methodist’s William A. Zoghbi, M.D. Centennial Chair in Cardiovascular Medicine and division chief of cardiovascular prevention and wellness, to create DHI. 

Its debut was announced in December 2024, but DHI already has much to brag about. For example, Rice assistant professor Lei Li and Eleftherios Mylonakis, chair of the department of medicine at Houston Methodist Hospital, have already received approval for animal testing for their combined innovation. Their novel imaging technology allows for early diagnosis of fatty liver disease using a smart camera.

“This would be a huge market. And apparently they’ve already found some biomarkers,” said Chatterjee. Part of the reason he’s so excited for that particular project is its significance in Houston and beyond. “This work came out of some ongoing care that Houston Methodist provides for patients from the Fifth Ward that are socioeconomically very poor, disadvantaged. And apparently there’ve been chemicals that have been dumped in their environment,” said Chatterjee. “So there’s a much higher incidence of liver disease that can also turn into liver cancer with that population. So if this was successful, this would have a huge impact on other similar communities across the country.”

Besides the go-ahead for further studies, the project has also gotten the blessing of the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H), a federal funding program that recently visited the DHI and encouraged the team to submit a proposal for funding as soon as they saw the work Li and Mylonakis were doing.
 

What we are aspiring to do is to change the rate at which innovation happens and especially gets adopted.

And DHI’s work only gets weirder and more wonderful. Another project is centered around digital twinning. In the realm of health care, a digital twin is a patient’s AI double, composed of that person’s genomic profile and personal health history. If the human patient becomes ill, their digital twin can fill in the gaps for treating physicians. Using digital twins will one day tell doctors how a patient’s disease might progress and how to treat it for the most auspicious outcomes. 

“All the top institutions like Stanford, Harvard [and] Rice are trying to work on this to see how to make it practical and helpful for clinical decision-making,” said Chatterjee.

No longer will doctors be using your weight and a guess to decide on your dose when it comes to medicating you. DHI has more than one project aimed at knowing how much chemotherapy or radiation a patient will need using AI. 

One that’s particularly promising comes from Meng Li, the Noah Harding Associate Professor in Statistics at Rice. Though he’s working on several projects in the cardiology space, one of the highlights also includes work in the OB-GYN and oncological fields. That endeavor seeks to use a multimodal AI model to reduce the amount of chemotherapy necessary to treat patients with advanced ovarian cancer, allowing them a better quality of life and more strength to fight their battles. That project is funded by a seed grant and Rice funds.

Another of Li’s projects combines his talents with Ashrith Guha, medical director of the heart transplant program at Houston Methodist. The pair is already working on a manuscript for publication on the subject of their machine learning method for heart analysis. The creation uses vast amounts of data from electrocardiograms for the purpose of predicting how patients’ right ventricles will function following surgery.

Though the inventions coming out of DHI are ultimately for patients, they will help medical professionals as well. Few will be more of a boon to those devoting their lives to the sick than a wearable device for surgeons. With the combined brainpower of Ashok Veeraraghavan, Rice’s department chair of electrical and computer engineering, and Randolph Steadman, the Houston Methodist Carole Walter Looke Centennial Chair in Anesthesia and Critical Care, surgeons will be able to boost the success of their work. 

“Ashok is developing automated computer vision tools for surgical training. So when surgeons are training and using their instruments like a tool tip, these goggles or headsets are able to track the performance, and then the surgeons are able to replay the videos or images and help improve their performance,” explained Chatterjee.

The executive director said that part of his role at DHI is to help develop an educational aspect that will allow Methodist’s clinical community to learn more about responsible usage of AI, as well as for Rice engineers to dig into the ins and outs of the medical field. 

Chatterjee said that, while fundraising in a city that’s not in the Silicon Valley is a challenge, part of what makes DHI unique is its home in Houston.

“We are one of the most diverse cities in America, and we represent what the future of the American population is going to look like all over, so it gives you really rich data where pharma companies, biotech companies, can test their algorithms, their machine learning platforms, and get insights that are going to be replicable across the country, especially in the years to come,” he said.

DHI has already proved that combining the innovative thinking of engineers with medical clinicians is the way forward to success in both fields. Chatterjee said since DHI was announced late last year, some large companies have already come knocking. And before long, some of Houston’s next change-making medtech companies will be coming out of the institute.