(Vienna, 04 June 2025) Two new joint cluster projects have been approved at MedUni Vienna and the University of Vienna to build bridges in research between the two universities. The topics being worked on are the reduction of vaccination fatigue and the clinical integration of AI models in cardiology.
The rectorates of both universities have selected the two best out of a total of 15 project proposals in a new call for proposals based on an international review. This time, the cluster projects were advertised in the T thematic focus area "Artificial Intelligence (AI) meets Medicine".
The new inter-university cluster projects will start in June 2025 and run for three years. The aim of the joint interdisciplinary research projects between the University of Vienna and MedUni Vienna is to promote translational research and innovative cooperation.
Synthetic patients to combat vaccination fatigue
An interdisciplinary project is developing AI-based "synthetic patients" to specifically counteract vaccination fatigue. The virtual models realistically simulate vaccine-sceptical behavior and enable new communication strategies to be tested.
The aim is to provide healthcare professionals with practical training in dealing with vaccine skeptics. The effectiveness of the methods will be verified by scientific studies. The project promises to make an innovative contribution to improving vaccination communication and strengthening public health.
The project is being led by Ursula Wiedermann-Schmidt from the Center for Pathophysiology, Infectiology and Immunology at MedUni Vienna and Robert Böhm from the Faculty of Psychology at the University of Vienna.
AICARD: Making AI understandable and usable for cardiology
The AICARD project aims to better integrate artificial intelligence into clinical practice - particularly in cardiology. The basic problem is that fragmented data, data protection requirements and a lack of transparency have so far made it difficult to use AI in everyday clinical practice.
AICARD is therefore developing a platform with three core components: a secure, multimodal data warehouse, an interface for intuitive visual data analysis and explainable AI models for predicting cardiology events. The aim is to increase trust in AI and thus noticeably improve clinical decisions and patient outcomes.
The project is being carried out by the Clinical Division of Cardiology (Christian Hengstenberg, Noemi Pavo, Manuel Mayr and Ronny Schweitzer), the Computational Imaging Lab (Georg Langs and Philipp Seeböck) and the Visualization and Data Analysis Research Group (Torsten Moeller and Laura Koesten) at the University of Vienna.