Prof. Dr. med. habil. Claudia Schmidtke has been an affiliated professor in the research area “AI for Assistive Health Technologies” at the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) in Lübeck since December 1, 2025. One focus of her work is AI-based research in gender and women’s health. With this affiliation, DFKI is addressing an area of AI research in healthcare that has not yet been systematically anchored: the consistent consideration of gender-specific differences in prevention, diagnostics, therapy, and care.

The DFKI Laboratory Lübeck pursues a unique approach that establishes gender and women’s health as a structural guiding principle along the entire AI innovation process – from the database to modeling and evaluation to application, care, and regulation. Despite growing evidence on gender differences, these have so far been insufficiently taken into account in data-driven AI systems. The aim is to gradually reduce the gender data gap. AI systems can help to visualize and quantify gender-specific biases in medical datasets, which are often male-dominated. There is also a need for gender-sensitive data collection and study designs.

In the research area Assistive Health Technologies (AGT), headed by Prof. Dr.-Ing. habil. Schmidtke develops and evaluates AI-supported assistance systems that integrate gender-sensitive data structures, algorithmic fairness and patient-centered decision support. The applications are intended to map the realities of care for women over the course of their lives and reduce care inequalities. The DFKI Laboratory Lübeck is thus positioning itself as a nationally visible reference location for AI in gender and women’s health and strengthening the connection between university medicine, non-university AI research, and health and innovation policy design.

Schmidtke is spokesperson for the University Heart Center Lübeck at the University Medical Center Schleswig-Holstein and professor of cardiac surgery. As a health economist and gender medicine specialist, she combines clinical expertise, health services research and health policy experience with application-oriented AI research. From 2017 to 2021, she was the Federal Government Commissioner for Patient Affairs and a member of the German Bundestag. She is currently Vice-Chair of the Arbitration Board for Digital Health Applications.

The affiliation underlines the need for interdisciplinary approaches in AI health research. Gender-specific differences influence disease progression, symptoms and treatment response, but are not sufficiently taken into account in many datasets and algorithms. This leads to distortions that can reduce the quality of care for women. With this focus, DFKI is setting an example for fairer and more inclusive AI systems.

By integrating gender aspects into the entire innovation process, AI applications are to become more precise and patient-oriented. The lab plans to identify biases in existing datasets and develop new standards for gender-sensitive data collection. In the long term, this could contribute to better prevention and therapy strategies for women, for example in cardiac medicine or for age-related diseases.

Editor: X-Press Journalistenbüro GbR

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