AI in Biomedical Research and the Diagnostics of Blood Diseases
Abstract:
Artificial Intelligence is transforming our world and society with extraordinary speed. What does this mean for biomedical research and disease diagnosis? What opportunities and risks arise? In my talk, I will present examples from the biomedical and clinical research conducted by my research group at Helmholtz Munich. I will cover the fundamentals of machine learning and AI and showcase applications that allow individual cells to be characterized with unprecedented accuracy. These technological breakthroughs promise new perspectives for both basic research and the personalized medicine of the future.
About Carsten:
Carsten Marr is the Founding Director of the Institute of AI for Health at Helmholtz Munich, a European center for applied artificial intelligence. His goal is to develop AI-based methods to improve the diagnosis, treatment, and understanding of diseases. After studying theoretical physics at the Technical University of Munich and the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics, Carsten transitioned from physics to theoretical biology. His doctoral research at the Technical University of Darmstadt focused on the architecture of biological networks and was awarded as the best dissertation of the year in the Department of Biology. Following postdoctoral positions in Munich, Bremen, and Edinburgh, Carsten founded his research group at Helmholtz Munich in 2013 and became Deputy Director of the Institute of Computational Biology. In interdisciplinary projects with life scientists and practicing physicians, he was among the first to apply deep learning to biomedical data. By training deep neural networks, he succeeded in predicting stem cell development from microscopy images and detecting leukemias in blood and bone marrow samples. For his work on researching and analyzing single-cell data, he has received several awards, including a prestigious ERC Consolidator Grant. Since July 2025, he has been Professor of AI in Hematology and Cell Therapy at Ludwig Maximilian University Munich.