An Analysis of Artificial Intelligence Adoption in NIH-Funded Research
This provides evidence-based insights for NIH funding strategy and health policy to address gaps in AI deployment and health equity, though it is incremental as it applies existing methods to new data.
The paper analyzed 58,746 NIH-funded biomedical research projects from 2025 to understand AI adoption, finding that AI constitutes 15.9% of the portfolio with a 13.4% funding premium, but identified a critical research-to-deployment gap with 79% of AI projects remaining in research/development stages and only 5.7% addressing health disparities.
Understanding the landscape of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) adoption across the National Institutes of Health (NIH) portfolio is critical for research funding strategy, institutional planning, and health policy. The advent of large language models (LLMs) has fundamentally transformed research landscape analysis, enabling researchers to perform large-scale semantic extraction from thousands of unstructured research documents. In this paper, we illustrate a human-in-the-loop research methodology for LLMs to automatically classify and summarize research descriptions at scale. Using our methodology, we present a comprehensive analysis of 58,746 NIH-funded biomedical research projects from 2025. We show that: (1) AI constitutes 15.9% of the NIH portfolio with a 13.4% funding premium, concentrated in discovery, prediction, and data integration across disease domains; (2) a critical research-to-deployment gap exists, with 79% of AI projects remaining in research/development stages while only 14.7% engage in clinical deployment or implementation; and (3) health disparities research is severely underrepresented at just 5.7% of AI-funded work despite its importance to NIH's equity mission. These findings establish a framework for evidence-based policy interventions to align the NIH AI portfolio with health equity goals and strategic research priorities.