Research collaboration launches research to better treat and identify AVMs
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At the intersection of medicine and engineering, Dr. Ali Alaraj and his team are using artificial intelligence to investigate arteriovenous malformations, better known as AVMs.
AVMs are congenital lesions in the brain caused when arteries and veins connect in an irregular way. This disrupts normal blood flow in arteries that move oxygen-rich blood from the heart to the brain and other organs while veins drain the oxygen-depleted blood back to the lungs and heart. Thus, the tangled blood vessels in an AVM do not form properly and can weaken and burst.
Alaraj, University of Illinois Hospital Professor and Section Chief of Endovascular Neurosurgery and affiliate professor in the Richard and Loan Hill Department of Biomedical Engineering, is a neurosurgeon who knows that when AVMs burst, the brain can bleed, and patients can experience symptoms such as seizures, headaches or pain in one area of the head. It can also cause muscle weakness or numbness in one part of the body; if severe, it can cause coma or death.
“AVMs have a higher chance of bleeding, and this is a disease that could affect younger patients and can present at a younger age—in someone’s thirties, forties, and fifties—where patients could present with bleeding inside the brain,” Alaraj said. “Even though AVMs are a rare disease, it’s a disease that could affect younger patients and ultimately could result with disability or even mortality.”
To better plan treatment for patients, Alaraj is working with an international team to use AI to better detect these lesions.
Alaraj is working with UIC College of Engineering’s Department of Computer Science Department Head and Professor Baoxin Li and UIC College of Medicine Department of Neurosurgery Professor and University of Illinois Hospital and Health Sciences System Section Chief of Stereotactic and Functional Neurosurgery Dr. Konstantin Slavin.
Alaraj and his team are also working with faculty part of the University Academic Alliance in Taiwan, which consists of 12 universities. The institutional partnership between the University of Illinois System and the University Academic Alliance in Taiwan was launched in 2023.
Alaraj and his team created an AI-type software for the detection and segmentation of patients’ imaging. Using the software on patients with AVMs, they will collect images, then look at their respective centers’ scans and test the software through which they will use AI to better detect AVMs on MRIs and CT scans. The ultimate goal is to better plan treatment for patients.
This collaborative research brings together expertise from computer science, data science, neurosurgery and imaging backgrounds.
“We’re hoping that we’ll get expand this collaboration between the College of Medicine and the and the College of Engineering to do more research and hopefully we can get more funding,” Alaraj said. “We hope to expand on this work and take our expertise into a different level where we can use AI in different way to analyze medical imaging in a different way where we can have more answers or different answers for our patients.”
“As an AI researcher, what excites me most about this project is getting to work on a problem as clinically urgent as AVM detection and seeing where our tools can make a difference,” Li said. “And honestly, interactions with the neurosurgeons on the team thus far have been eye‑opening, since some conversations have sparked ideas I never would have reached on my own, especially since so much of my earlier work focused on standard datasets rather than real clinical cases.”
“In the world, researchers are trying to incorporate the latest and most advanced type of artificial intelligence in analyzing patients imaging and giving information for surgeons about where the pathology is and how to find it and how to analyze it on the MRI for better planning in the future,” Alaraj said. “This type of research, which is a collaborative type of research, incorporates the best of the technology that’s out there, trying to use artificial intelligence in a way for the future that could be helpful for patient’s outcome and planning.”
Their grant started in December 2025. Through their platform, the researchers hope to create an infrastructure, develop collaborative understanding, and expand their software to ultimately can take this research to another level.
“This will hopefully be a stepping stone that we can move into larger research projects that we can explore in the in the future,” Alaraj said.
Other members of the University Academic Alliance in Taiwan include National Taiwan University of Science and Technology Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering Professor Hsing-Kuo Pao, National Taiwan University Institute of Medical Devices and Imaging Associate Professor Furen Xiao, National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University Department of Surgery Associate Professor Huai-Che Yang, and Taipei Medical University Department of Surgery Assistant Professor I-Chang Su.