Federal Project Grant Award Summary

The University of Florida's Division of Sponsored Research received a $632,670 Project Grant from the National Cancer Institute (NCI) under the Cancer Detection and Diagnosis Research program (CFDA 93.394), effective June 1, 2026, through May 31, 2031. This award supports the development of "Renal Mass Diagnosis and Management Through AI-Enhanced Decision Support Systems" (RMM-DSS), which addresses significant diagnostic and management challenges in kidney cancer detection. The project will deliver transformer-based vision-language models (VLMs) for medical image segmentation, clinical concept extraction, and automated radiology report generation. These AI-enhanced tools will be trained on datasets from the University of Florida Health Integrated Data Repository and public imaging datasets, designed to integrate medical imaging with electronic health records (EHRs) to improve risk stratification and clinical decision-making for renal masses.

The project aims to overcome current barriers to AI adoption in clinical settings by developing reliable segmentation algorithms, integrating multimodal patient data, and ensuring usability within existing clinical workflows. By leveraging a multidisciplinary team with expertise in data science and renal research, the deliverables will include evidence-based decision support capabilities to reduce diagnostic variability and improve treatment planning for both small and large renal masses. This research directly supports NCI's mission to advance screening, early detection, and diagnostic techniques for cancer patients, with particular emphasis on preventing unnecessary surgical interventions for benign lesions while improving outcomes for malignant cases.