i think you've got the right idea about getting involved. i would say that your expertise would be wasted if you try to do the ML stuff yourself. you should definitely leverage your biggest asset as a domain expert and find some ml researchers who can be the tech experts. others have pointed out how reaching out to universities can be a good way to start. maybe you can look into some medtech startups that would like to have a chat with your about this stuff

in terms of getting to know the tech itself, you should have some layman's understanding of how the ml works. for that i'd recommend finding some good ml content geared towards enthusiasts rather than professionals. stuff like computerphile's videos on models and concepts like GPT, diffusion models, encoder decoder networks, and deep learning in general. you may also want to find videos and demos in to things like Word2Vec, google's BERT, and zero shot learning in NLP in general. also look at the e-palm model google just released a demo of. that some of task tranlation is probably your biggest lead