Sean M. Healey & AMG Center for ALS Announces 2025 Corcoran Family Award Recipient

The Sean M. Healey & AMG Center for ALS is excited to announce Eric Rosenthal, MD as the 2025 recipient of the Corcoran Family Award. At Mass General Brigham, Dr. Rosenthal clinically serves as the medical director of the MGH Neurosciences Intensive Care Unit and academically as the program director for the Mass General Brigham NeuroAI Center.

For more than a decade, Dr. Rosenthal has been developing tools for predicting patient outcomes that leverage artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML). This work has included predicting impending deterioration in patients with a ruptured brain aneurysm, coma recovery after acute brain injury, functional recovery after cardiac arrest, and readiness to liberate seizures patients from anesthetic control. More recently, Dr. Rosenthal has worked to bring colleagues together from multiple centers to build larger datasets linking electronic health record, imaging, physiology, neurologic data, and annotations through standards and trusted research environments to enable AI ready data to build robust and resilient tools to improve patient care.

In founding the Mass General Brigham NeuroAI Center, Dr. Rosenthal has worked to extend these approaches to benefit the broad array of patients needing neurologic and neurosurgical care. This has included developing a secure cloud computing platform at Mass General Brigham for research collaboration, code libraries to support data science and AI/ML research, and educational workshops to develop an AI workforce within the Mass General Brigham Neuroscience community. This local work at Mass General Brigham is amplified by Dr. Rosenthal’s work to support the new Commonwealth of Massachusetts AI Hub, led by Governor Healey’s office, service supporting the NIH Bridge to Artificial (Bridge2AI) Intelligence Consortium as co-chair of its steering committee, and as the lead for the NIH AI training program AIM-AHEAD Bridge2AI for Clinical Care.

The Corcoran Family Award will enable Dr. Rosenthal’s work to extend to ALS, aiming to develop AI/ML tools for earlier ALS diagnosis. Dr. Rosenthal explains, “The number of treatments for ALS continues to grow. To help patients with ALS receive the greatest benefit from these treatments, we need to diagnose patients at the earliest stage possible. While we have previously worked with data from compressed periods of time in the hospital, the Corcoran Family Award allows our team to utilize the same tools for analyzing linked data of multiple modalities, or types, in the outpatient setting. There are times when patients may have subtle symptoms or clinical findings that may not yet be recognized as ALS. We aim to learn the earliest time at which a pattern or trend in these clinical findings should be referred for definitive diagnosis by an ALS specialist.”

To support this work, Dr. Rosenthal and Morteza Zabihi, PhD, will be recruiting a postdoctoral fellow in AI with a skillset in multimodal AI and natural language processing to examine data from existing research studies in which ALS patients have participated, while developing new datasets retracing the steps of patients who later presented to ALS specialists. Dr. Rosenthal noted, “Large research datasets developed through the participation of patients with ALS are incredibly helpful to train AI/ML models that can then be validated or fine-tuned in other settings. In this way, the broad community of ALS patients can benefit from their power of those who have participated in research.”

To learn more about this work, please reach out to erosenthal@mgh.harvard.edu.

Previous Corcoran Award recipients include Doreen Ho, MD (2024) and Mark Garret, MD (2023).

About the Sean M. Healey & AMG Center for ALS at Mass General

At the Sean M. Healey & AMG Center for ALS at Mass General, we are committed to bringing together a global network of scientists, physicians, nurses, foundations, federal agencies, and people living with ALS, their loved ones, and caregivers to accelerate the pace of ALS therapy discovery and development.

Launched in November 2018, the Healey & AMG Center, under the leadership of Merit Cudkowicz, MD and a Science Advisory Council of international experts, is reimagining how to develop and test the most promising therapies to treat the disease, identify cures and ultimately prevent it.

With many clinical trials and lab-based research studies in progress right now, we are ushering in a new phase of ALS treatment and care. Together, we will find the cures.