AI Articles and Analysis in Healthcare

Episode Summary: If there's any industry ripe for disruption by AI and ML applications, it's healthcare. This week, we speak with Eleven Two Capital's Founder and Managing Partner Shelley Zhuang, whose investment focus (among other spaces) is on innovative healthcare services and applications. In addition to discussing how AI and ML is helping propel genomics, diagnostics, therapeutic treatment, and other innovations into a new paradigm, she touches on what the healthcare space might look like in the next 10 years. For healthcare startups looking to break into the healthcare market, Zhuang doesn't pretend to have simple answers; however, she identifies commonalities among smart companies that have prepared early for meeting regulatory and other industry considerations. This interview was recorded live in San Francisco at Re-Work's Machine Intelligence in Autonomous Vehicles Summit in March 2017.

The last few years have yielded a tremendous amount of attention at the intersection of AI and healthcare, from DeepMind's partnership with the UK's National Health Service to IBM's continued pushes into areas of genomics and drug discovery. From the perspective of healthcare executives, however, many important questions are left unanswered and rarely addressed in detail:
What difference are healthcare's machine learning innovations likely to make in the lives of patients?
What disruptions should healthcare executives prepare themselves for now?
How will the healthcare industry operate differently in 5 or 10 years into the future?
We surveyed over 50 executives of healthcare companies leveraging AI. We aimed to do the hard work of separating the companies actually applying AI from those who use it as a buzzword (over 15 of our initial survey responses were turned down due to lack of evidence of real AI in use), presenting important predictions and industry insights in clear and interactive charts and graphs.
The following research article is broken down into five sections:

Episode Summary: Venture investing in AI healthcare applications has been on the uptick and is directly related to the subject of this week's episode: just how the healthcare industry is (and isn't) being impacted by innovations in AI technology. Guest Steve Gullans of Boston-Based Excel Venture Management talks about some of the various healthcare-related ML and AI applications that he sees being brought to light, and touches on which innovations have a better chance of getting blocked and redirected by parties of interest and those that have more promise in being accepted and rolled out sooner.

Deep Learning plays a vital role in the early detection of cancer. A study published by NVIDIA showed that deep learning drops error rate for breast cancer diagnoses by 85%. This was the inspiration for Co-Founders Jeet Raut and Peter Njenga when they created AI imaging medical platform Behold.ai. Raut’s mother was told that she no longer had breast cancer, a diagnosis that turned out to be false and that could have cost her life.

When it comes to effectiveness of machine learning, more data almost always yields better results—and the healthcare sector is sitting on a data goldmine. McKinsey estimates that big data and machine learning in pharma and medicine could generate a value of up to $100B annually, based on better decision-making, optimized innovation, improved efficiency of research/clinical trials, and new tool creation for physicians, consumers, insurers, and regulators.
Where does all this data come from? If we could look at labeled data streams, we might see research and development (R&D); physicians and clinics; patients; caregivers; etc. The array of (at present) disparate origins is part of the issue in synchronizing this information and using it to improve healthcare infrastructure and treatments. Hence, the present-day core issue at the intersection of machine learning and healthcare: finding ways to effectively collect and use lots of different types of data for better analysis, prevention, and treatment of individuals.
Burgeoning applications of ML in pharma and medicine are glimmers of a potential future in which synchronicity of data, analysis, and innovation are an everyday reality.
At Emerj, the AI Research and Advisory Company, we research how AI is impacting the pharmaceutical industry as part of our AI Opportunity Landscape service. Global pharma companies use AI Opportunity Landscapes to find out where AI fits at their company and which AI applications are driving value in the industry.
In this article, we use insights from our research to provide a breakdown of several of the pioneering applications of AI in pharma and areas for continued innovation.

In 1895, the German physicist, Wilhelm Röntgen, showed his wife Anna an X-ray of her hand. “I have seen my death,” she said. Medical imaging broke paradigms when it first began more than 100 years ago, and deep learning medical applications that have evolved over the past few years seem poised to once again take us beyond our current reality and open up new possibilities in the field.

In July of 2016, we sent out a series of survey questions to past guests who have been featured on the Emerj podcast, including academic researchers, founders, and executives who are experts in the machine learning domain. In this article, we focus on responses to the following question:

Episode Summary: I remember reading an article in Scientific American years ago about a poster of a person looking in the direction people sitting in a school dining room, and that this poster would make people sitting in the dining room less likely to litter. This seems like an absurd example of holding people accountable for their actions, but as it turns out, there are a lot more serious consequences to ensuring behavior change through observation, and one area where this matters is medicine.
Today, there’s a major issue with people who don't adhere to their medical regimens, only to relapse or experience more serious symptoms later on. This week's guest, Cory Kidd, CEO of Catalia Health and known for his work at MIT on human-robotic interaction, is working to help solve this problem by developing a robot that adds some of that physical presence and accountability. This is likely one of many novel medical AI applications that we're likely to see roll out in healthcare over the next decade.