The Potential of Using Artificial Intelligence To Solve the Puzzle of Salutogenesis

This talk took place at the 2021 Integrative Medicine & Health Symposium, hosted by the Academic Consortium for Integrative Medicine & Health.

NCCIH is coleading an exciting new initiative across the National Institutes of Health (NIH) involving artificial intelligence (AI) that will create research avenues for the integrative medicine community. The program will provide opportunities to generate multilevel datasets on health restoration/salutogenesis that would bring novel and transformative analytical methods to the complementary and integrative health community. Vast resources and efforts are already invested toward understanding the pathogenesis of disease. In contrast, salutogenesis, the process by which individuals move from a less healthy to a healthier state, is understudied and poorly understood. Salutogenesis may occur via “pathogenesis in reverse” and/or may engage other yet-to-be-defined pathways in the process of restoring health. In either case, the process of salutogenesis is likely to involve multiple physiological systems (e.g., cardiovascular, digestive, metabolic, immune), domains (bio-psycho-social), and spatiotemporal scales. Unlike pharmacologic treatments that target specific molecular pathways, health restoration may incorporate behavioral and homeostatic physiological mechanisms, as well as complex endogenous cellular processes such as repair, resolution, and regeneration. The unprecedented “grand challenge” of understanding salutogenesis will require innovative analytical tools using AI to develop multiscale computational models that explain how physiological and biopsychosocial networks dynamically change over time during the process of human health restoration. NCCIH leadership and staff will discuss these concepts and encourage the complementary and integrative health researcher community to participate in a program that will propel biomedical and behavioral research forward by setting the stage for widespread adoption of AI in tackling complex challenges beyond our current human intuition.

This session was recorded and can be viewed online:

• Introduction by Dr. Emmeline Edwards, director of the NCCIH Division of Extramural Research
• The Potential of Using Artificial Intelligence To Solve the Puzzle of Salutogenesis by Dr. Helene M. Langevin, NCCIH director
• The NIH Common Fund’s Bridge to Artificial Intelligence Program by Dr. Lanay Mudd, program director in the Clinical Research in Complementary and Integrative Health Branch of the NCCIH Division of Extramural Research
• Question and Answer Session moderated by Dr. Jeffrey Dusek, director of research at the University Hospitals Connor Integrative Health Network; associate professor in the Department of Family Medicine and Community Health at Case Western Reserve University