Launched in partnership with American tech company nference, Qrativ (pronounced'curative') combines Mayo Clinic's medical expertise and clinical data with nference's AI platform nferX. The deep learning-driven AI sifts through masses of medical literature and clinical data to uncover insights into disease and will form the basis of Qrativ's Darwin.ai These insights can then be used to guide the development of new drugs. The hope for many is that the data mining capabilities of AI technology can reveal insights from clinical data that would otherwise be impossible for human researchers to do within their lifetime. For the Mayo Clinic, Qrativ continues its interest in AI.
This was especially evident at London's recent CogX event, where industry thought leaders from around the world gathered to discuss the irrefutable impact that AI is already having across a multitude of sectors, and also to try and begin to answer some of these pressing questions. There is no doubt that AI and other technological advancements will change the way we live and work, and it will undoubtedly make some roles redundant. There are a multitude of positive examples demonstrating that AI is already impacting people's lives in positive ways. AI technology has huge potential to make people's lives better.
Yet latest technological developments seem to signal that there is no place to hide anymore: Scientists at the University of Oulu in Finland have developed facial recognition software that can read human microexpressions at a success rate that beats humans at the same task. Charles Darwin himself backed up the claim that microexpressions are culture-neutral: in 1872, he wrote in his book The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals that "facial expressions of emotion are universal, not learned differently in each culture". The most prominent emoticons are in essence a reflection of the original six universal emotions that Paul Ekman initially determined in the 1960s: joy, surprise, sadness, anger, disgust and fear. Today, Xiaobai Li and his team at the University of Oulu in Finland have developed a machine vision algorithm that can spot and recognize microexpressions with equal success as human experts, but greatly outperforms these experts in the recognition task part alone.
Artificial intelligence helps farmers, doctors and rescue workers make a positive impact on society. There is a growing number of AI applications actively improving people's lives and creating positive change in the world. "AI will deliver societal transformation on par with the industrial, digital and information revolutions," Bryant told the SXSW audience. One of AI's greatest impacts could be in food production -- an industry challenged by a rapidly growing world population, competition for natural resources and plateauing agricultural productivity.
Meanwhile, I've turned up a small British company that's using its artificial intelligence platform discover promising small molecule treatments faster – and cheaper – than ever before. According to a recent report from the Tufts Center for the Study of Drug Development, here's how the costs break down: $1.4 billion in direct spending, $1.2 billion in lost use of funds over the decade, and more than $300 million in post-approval costs. Like I said before, this is a privately held firm, so Wall Street will tell you that there's no way you can directly profit from this tiny firm's work. Today he is the editor of the monthly tech investing newsletter Nova-X Report as well as Radical Technology Profits, where he covers truly radical technologies – ones that have the power to sweep across the globe and change the very fabric of our lives – and profit opportunities they give rise to.
With that said and since this is an Editorial, I want to explore this arena as a futurist of sorts, and ask whether there may be limits to the natural progression of how big data can and will be incorporated into rheumatologic practice. It just gave me a moment to wonder whether there may be a downside to the continued application of big data in the patient care arena. Now, I hope you all know that I am far from a Luddite, but when I read the New England Journal of Medicine editorial, I was struck by something that was absent – I never found even a reference or mention made for the role of empathy in complex care models. Instead of looking at 10 or 50 variables, machine learning will be able to incorporate 10,000 variables and then can tell us, to the highest degree of accuracy, that drug X is essential for patient Y.
So later, freestyle matches were organized in which supercomputers could play against human chess players assisted by AI (they were called human/AI centaurs). In 2014 in a Freestyle Battle, the AI chess players won 42 games, but centaurs won 53 games. Recently, the AI research branch of the search giant, Google, launched its Google Deepmind Health project, which is used to mine the data of medical records in order to provide better and faster health services. Google DeepMind already launched a partnership with the UK's National Health Service to improve the process of delivering care with digital solutions.
The free app Ada, which offered up this diagnosis, was launched in the UK in April. Before his Babylon venture, Parsa spent several years running UK hospitals. The underlying tech knits together several strands of AI: the ability to process natural language, including speech, so that you can be understood when you casually describe your symptoms; expert systems that trawl vast databases of the world's medical knowledge in an instant; and machine learning software trained to spot correlations between millions of different complaints and conditions. Ada uses both unsupervised and human-supervised learning to train the app, and Babylon makes sure its doctors agree with the app at least 99 per cent of the time.
Artificial intelligence software combined with a robotic harness could help spinal injury and stroke patients walk again. Rehabilitation programs for spinal cord injuries or strokes usually have patients walk on treadmills at a steady pace while harnesses support their weight to varying degrees. As part of a clinical trial of this "neurorobotic platform," the researchers experimented with 26 volunteers recovering from spinal cord injuries or strokes, whose disability ranged from being able to walk without assistance to being able to neither stand nor walk independently. After the volunteers walked roughly 20 meters using the neurorobotic platform to familiarize themselves with the apparatus, three patients with spinal cord injuries who previously could not stand independently could, immediately after such practice, walk with or without assistance.
The procedure involves harvesting stem cells from the patient's own blood and injecting them back into their body; injecting bioquantines into the patient's spinal cord; and performing 15 days of laser and median nerve stimulation, monitoring the patients using MRI scans. The initial goal is to re-start the body's ability to, unaided, pump the heart and breathe; no one is expecting the treatment to immediately reanimate the patients so that they're jumping off the bed - but the project aims to lay the groundwork for future, further developments that can enhance levels of consciousness and recovery. The procedure involves harvesting stem cells from the patient's own blood and injecting them back into their body; injecting bioquantines into the patient's spinal cord; and performing 15 days of laser and median nerve stimulation, monitoring the patients using MRI scans. The initial goal is to re-start the body's ability to, unaided, pump the heart and breathe; no one is expecting the treatment to immediately reanimate the patients so that they're jumping off the bed - but the project aims to lay the groundwork for future, further developments that can enhance levels of consciousness and recovery.