IRB drafting with Generative AI
Greetings and welcome to the first blog post for this website. The content here will be very varied, covering topics from (generative) AI to science to the occasional music/religion/philosophy digressions. While this variation may not appeal to some, I have always been interested in a wide variety of things and this website is intended to portray authenticity. While I will use generative AI at times to expedite content generation, I will always review and revise it, and ensure that all posts reflect me, my passions, and my opinions. With that in mind, all text here is my own (with some AI assists from time to time) and is not indicative of any belief, perspective, opinion, etc., of any part present our future employer. If there are particular topics here that you find more or less interesting, feel free to reach out and let me know what you’d like to see more of.
To kick off the posting, I’d like to share my most recent publication with you…
As generative AI burst into the zeitgeist in 2023, its reshaping how people work, myself included. As a data scientist working in health care there are many ways generative AI can change the status quo. In my opinion, it will be some time before this tech is a mainstay in clinical care, but there are many ways it can improve clinical research today. One such example is with the protocol application for carrying out human subject research. Institutions that carry out human subject research require a review board who ensures research is carried out ethically and in a way to minimize potential harm to the participants. Drafting a protocol form for an institutional review board (IRB) can be daunting for new researchers and time consuming for experienced ones. To expedite drafting an IRB protocol form, we created an open source tool to use generative AI to create a first draft of the form by filing out a simple form. Researchers simply need to input information about the research hypothesis, add details regarding supporting literature, and some information about the type of research to be conducted (e.g., retrospective), and the tool will create a first draft in mere minutes. The tool includes a custom literature search tool to minimize hallucinations (where generative AI can fabricate references or facts) by using the PubMed search to independently find and summarize relevant research. There’s much more to it and if you’re interested in learning about it in detail or using the tool yourself, check out these links:
https://authors.elsevier.com/sd/article/S2352-7110(23)00297-2
https://github.com/UABPeriopAI/IRB_Assistant
Let me know what you think with the comments below, or send me an email (ryancgodwin@gmail.com)