Artificial Intelligence - The Precision Medicine Initiative.

 

Precision medicine, or preventative and treatment measures that account for individual variability, is not a new concept.

For more than a century, blood type has been used to guide blood transfusions.

However, the recent development of large-scale biologic databases (such as the human genome sequence), powerful methods for characterizing patients (such as proteomics, metabolomics, genomics, diverse cellular assays, and even mobile health technology), and computational tools for analyzing large sets of data have significantly improved the prospect of expanding this application to more broad uses (Collins and Varmus 2015, 793).

The Precision Medicine Initiative (PMI), which was launched by President Barack Obama in 2015, is a long-term research endeavor including the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and a number of other public and commercial research organizations.

The initiative's goal, as stated, is to learn how a person's genetics, environment, and lifestyle can help determine viable disease prevention, treatment, and mitigation strategies.

It consists of both short- and long-term objectives.

The short-term objectives include advancing precision medicine in cancer research.

Scientists at the National Cancer Institute (NCI), for example, want to employ a better understanding of cancer's genetics and biology to develop new, more effective treatments for diverse kinds of the illness.

The long-term objectives of PMI are to introduce precision medicine to all aspects of health and health care on a wide scale.

To that goal, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) created the All of Us Research Program in 2018, which enlists the help of at least one million volunteers from throughout the country.

Participants will provide genetic information, biological samples, and other health-related information.

Contributors will be able to view their health information, as well as research that incorporates their data, throughout the study to promote open data sharing.

Researchers will utilize the information to look at a variety of illnesses in order to better forecast disease risk, understand how diseases develop, and develop better diagnostic and treatment options (Morrison 2019, 6).

The PMI is designed to provide doctors with the information and assistance they need to incorporate personalized medicine services into their practices in order to accurately focus therapy and enhance health outcomes.

It will also work to enhance patient access to their medical records and assist physicians in using electronic technologies to make health information more accessible, eliminate inefficiencies in health-care delivery, cut costs, and improve treatment quality (Madara 2016, 1).

While the initiative explicitly states that participants will not get a direct medical benefit as a result of their participation, it also states that their participation may lead to medical breakthroughs that will benefit future generations.

It will generate substantially more effective health treatments that assure quality and equality in support of efforts to both prevent illness and decrease premature mortality by extending evidence-based disease models to include individuals from historically underrepresented communities (Haskins 2018, 1).

~ Jai Krishna Ponnappan

Find Jai on Twitter | LinkedIn | Instagram

You may also want to read more about Artificial Intelligence here.

See also: 

Clinical Decision Support Systems; Computer-Assisted Diagnosis.

References & Further Reading:

Collins, Francis S., and Harold Varmus. 2015. “A New Initiative on Precision Medicine.” New England Journal of Medicine 372, no. 2 (February 26): 793–95.

Haskins, Julia. 2018. “Wanted: 1 Million People to Help Transform Precision Medicine: All of Us Program Open for Enrollment.” Nation’s Health 48, no. 5 (July 2018): 1–16.

Madara, James L. 2016 “AMA Statement on Precision Medicine Initiative.” February 25, 2016. Chicago, IL: American Medical Association.

Morrison, S. M. 2019. “Precision Medicine.” Lister Hill National Center for Biomedical Communications. U.S. National Library of Medicine. Bethesda, MD: National Institutes of Health, Department of Health and Human Services.

Artificial Intelligence in Medicine.

 

Artificial intelligence aids health-care providers by aiding with activities that need large-scale data management.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is revolutionizing how clinicians diagnose, treat, and predict outcomes in clinical settings.

In the 1970s, Scottish surgeon Alexander Gunn used computer analysis to assist diagnose nose severe abdominal discomfort, which was one of the earliest effective applications of artificial intelligence in medicine.

Artificial intelligence applications have risen in quantity and complexity since then, in line with advances in computer science.

Artificial neural networks, fuzzy expert systems, evolutionary computation, and hybrid intelligent systems are the most prevalent AI applications in medicine.

Artificial neural networks (ANNs) are brain-inspired systems that mimic how people learn and absorb information.

Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts created the first artificial "neurons" in the mid-twentieth century.

Paul Werbos has just given artificial neural networks the capacity to execute backpropagation, which is the process of adjusting neural layers in response to new events.

ANNs are built up of linked processors known as "neurons" that process data in parallel.

In most cases, these neurons are divided into three layers: input, middle (or hidden), and output.

Each layer is completely related to the one before it.

Individual neurons are connected or linked, and a weight is assigned to them.

The technology "learns" by adjusting these weights.

The creation of sophisticated tools capable of processing nonlinear data and generalizing from inaccurate data sets is made feasible by ANNs.

Because of their capacity to spot patterns and interpret nonlinear data, ANNs have found widespread use in therapeutic contexts.

ANNs are utilized in radiology for image analysis, high-risk patient identification, and intensive care data analysis.

In instances where a variety of factors must be evaluated, ANNs are extremely beneficial for diagnosing and forecasting outcomes.

Artificial intelligence techniques known as fuzzy expert systems may operate in confusing situations.

In contrast to systems based on traditional logic, fuzzy systems are founded on the understanding that data processing often has to deal with ambiguity and vagueness.

Because medical information is typically complicated and imprecise, fuzzy expert systems are useful in health care.

Fuzzy systems can recognize, understand, manipulate, and use ambiguous information for a variety of purposes.

Fuzzy logic algorithms are being utilized to predict a variety of outcomes for patients with cancers including lung cancer and melanoma.

They've also been utilized to create medicines for those who are dangerously unwell.

Algorithms inspired by natural evolutionary processes are used in evolutionary computing.

Through trial and error, evolutionary computing solves issues by optimizing their performance.

They produce an initial set of solutions and then make modest random adjustments to the data set and discard failed intermediate solutions with each subsequent generation.

These solutions have been exposed to mutation and natural selection in some way.

As the fitness of the solutions improves, the consequence is algorithms that develop over time.

While there are many other types of these algorithms, the genetic algorithm is the most common one utilized in the field of medicine.

These were created in the 1970s by John Holland and make use of fundamental evolutionary patterns to build solutions in complicated situations like healthcare settings.

They're employed for a variety of clinical jobs including diagnostics, medical imaging, scheduling, and signal processing, among others.

Hybrid intelligent systems are AI technologies that mix many systems to take use of the advantages of the methodologies discussed above.

Hybrid systems are better at imitating human logic and adapting to changing circumstances.

These systems, like the individual AI technologies listed above, are being applied in a variety of healthcare situations.

Currently, they are utilized to detect breast cancer, measure myocardial viability, and interpret digital mammograms.

~ Jai Krishna Ponnappan

Find Jai on Twitter | LinkedIn | Instagram

You may also want to read more about Artificial Intelligence here.

See also: 

Clinical Decision Support Systems; Computer-Assisted Diagnosis; MYCIN; Precision Medicine Initiative.

References & Further Reading:

Baeck, Thomas, David B. Fogel, and Zbigniew Michalewicz, eds. 1997. Handbook of Evolutionary Computation. Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press.

Eiben, Agoston, and Jim Smith. 2003. Introduction to Evolutionary Computing. Berlin: Springer-Verlag.

Patel, Jigneshkumar L., and Ramesh K. Goyal. 2007. “Applications of Artificial Neural Networks in Medical Science.” Current Clinical Pharmacology 2, no. 3: 217–26.

Ramesh, Anavai N., Chandrasekhar Kambhampati, John R. T. Monson, and Patrick J. Drew. 2004. “Artificial Intelligence in Medicine.” Annals of the Royal College of Surgeons of England 86, no. 5: 334–38.