An Analysis of Artificial Intelligence Adoption in NIH-Funded Research

TL;DR

This paper analyzes NIH-funded AI research, revealing its distribution, deployment gap, and underrepresentation in health disparities, using large language models for large-scale classification and summarization.

Contribution

It introduces a human-in-the-loop methodology with LLMs for large-scale analysis of biomedical research projects and provides comprehensive insights into NIH AI funding.

Findings

AI makes up 15.9% of NIH portfolio with a 13.4% funding premium.

79% of AI projects are in research/development stages, only 14.7% in clinical deployment.

Health disparities research is only 5.7% of AI-funded work.

Abstract

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.