Sorting out AI, ML, DL, and NLP

The alphabet soup of acronyms in the world Artificial Intelligence. What are they? What do they mean? What is the difference between them? This is our ongoing reporting on AI and how it is being integrated into healthcare technology. We are seeking out the thought leaders and innovations that are moving the needle forward using artificial intelligence. Read more posts on Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare.

Follow the hashtag #AIinHealthcare.

To Listen

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Tune in to The Incrementalist this week, as Dr. Nick speaks with Tom Goodmanson, CEO of Calabrio. They will be discussing contact tracing, and how Calabrio is supporting Public Health Agencies and companies with contact tracing using call centers, technology, machine learning, and AI. The show will rebroadcast at 4:00am, 12 noon, and 8:00pm ET every weekday.

In the News

Onfido and Delfin Health Partner to Bring Employees Safely Back to Work and Get People Traveling Again Amid COVID-19 Pandemic
Onfido (@Onfido), the global identity verification and authentication company, has partnered with Delfin Health, a digital health solutions provider, to ensure employees and the traveling public can be quickly and securely onboarded to Delfin’s AI-powered health data management solution, Klarity.

Welldoc, University of Maryland’s CHIDS Employ AI to Identify Digital Health Habits™ that May Predict Improved Outcomes
Welldoc® (@Welldoc), a trailblazer in digital health that is revolutionizing chronic disease management to help transform lives, and the University of Maryland’s (@UofMaryland) Center for Health Information and Decision System (CHIDS) announced findings as a result of their continued health data analytics partnership aimed at gaining insights into successful patterns of digital health engagement. CHIDS applied their machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence-driven (AI) analytical methods to discover habits in how individuals with cardiometabolic diseases are using Welldoc’s award-winning digital health tool, BlueStar®, to improve the self-management of their chronic disease and associated health, economic and quality outcomes.

Change Healthcare Artificial Intelligence Decreases Administrative Burden of Case Management
Change Healthcare (@Change_HC) announced innovative new Artificial Intelligence models, trained by expert physicians, which extract meaningful diagnostic information from text in EHRs. The first application of this technology will be within the InterQual AutoReview™ solution, which automates medical necessity reviews using real-time data from EHRs.

Intel Artificial Intelligence Powers Samsung Medison’s Fetal Ultrasound Smart Workflow
Samsung Medison and Intel (@intelnews) are collaborating on new smart workflow solutions to improve obstetric measurements that contribute to maternal and fetal safety and can help save lives. Using an Intel® Core™ i3 processor, the Intel® Distribution of OpenVINO™ toolkit and OpenCV library, Samsung Medison’s BiometryAssist™ automates and simplifies fetal measurements, while LaborAssist™ automatically estimates the fetal angle of progression (AoP) during labor for a complete understanding of a patient’s birthing progress, without the need for invasive digital vaginal exams.

Health Systems Can Look to Contracts for Untapped Savings
TractManager (@tractmanager), a strategic sourcing, contract lifecycle management, and provider management company, announced the public release of a white paper that demonstrates how healthcare organizations can take advantage of artificial intelligence (AI)-driven contract lifecycle management (CLM) solutions to decrease expenses and increase operating margins. Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, organizations were already struggling with declining margins. Since COVID, those margins have plummeted into the red for many, and the financial pressure has increased to unprecedented levels.

GC Pharma Taps Small Molecule AI Expert Atomwise to Expand Hemophilia Franchise
Atomwise (@AtomwiseInc), a company using artificial intelligence (AI) for small molecule drug discovery, announced a partnership with GC Pharma, a South Korean biopharmaceutical company formerly known as Green Cross Corporation, to discover and develop novel hemophilia therapies.

Viz.ai Granted Medicare New Technology Add-on Payment
In a groundbreaking ruling, CMS has granted Viz.ai (@viz_ai) the first New Technology Add-on Payment (NTAP) for artificial intelligence software. NTAP, part of the CMS Inpatient Prospective Payment System (IPPS), was set up to support the adoption of cutting-edge technologies that have demonstrated substantial clinical improvement and ensure early availability to Medicare patients. In the US, stroke is the number one cause of long term disability, but is a treatable condition if identified early enough.

Microsoft’s AI for Health Supports COVID-19 Vaccine Development
Given the global urgency of the COVID-19 pandemic, Microsoft’s (@Health_IT) AI for Health program has stepped in to support the development and potential deployment of Vaxine’s COVAX-19 vaccine with a philanthropic grant.

Wolters Kluwer Adds AI to Clinical Surveillance For Faster C. Difficile Infection Prediction
Wolters Kluwer, Health (@wkhealth) has announced that its Sentri7 clinical surveillance solution has been enhanced with artificial intelligence (AI) technology to identify patients at risk for Clostridioides difficile (C. diff) infection. The solution uses a highly advanced and validated algorithm to produce C. diff infection (CDI) risk scores for individual patients, empowering clinicians to proactively alter patient care to reduce risks for infection and improve outcomes.

To Watch

HIMSS Webinar Highlight – What It Takes to Prime a Healthcare Organization for AI and ML

To Read

To Follow

The Basics and Resources

From the leading text book around the world, Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach.

Artificial Intelligence is composed of six different disciplines:

  1. Natural Language Processing to enable it to communicate successfully in English
  2. Knowledge Representation to store what it knows or hears
  3. Automated Reasoning to use the stored information to answer questions and to draw new conclusions
  4. Machine Learning to adapt to new circumstances and to detect and extrapolate patterns
  5. Computer Vision to perceive objects
  6. Robotics to manipulate objects and move about

To build a generally intelligent agent, you need machine learning in addition to the other aspects mentioned above.

Machine Learning is roughly the science of prediction. Given certain knowns (features), you wish to predict some unknowns (targets). The unknown could be structured (e.g. numeric) or unstructured (e.g. a string response).

Deep Learning is a sub field of machine learning where concepts are learned hierarchically. The simplest concepts emerge first, followed by more complicated concepts that build on the simpler ones. Usually, this leads to a simple layered hierarchy of concepts.

Optum Resource Library

Natural Language Processing: AI with an ROI
Health care providers need to see a return on any analytic investment they make. Natural language processing (NLP) is one way AI can help providers convert the potential within their health data into quality improvement and cost savings. Natural language processing is an AI technology that actually makes sense for health care.

IBM Analytics

Navigating the A.I. and Cognitive Maze – If you work in the area of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Cognitive Computing, you might use buzz words and phrases which to others might be perceived as confusing jargon. This article attempts to explain what these terms mean, how they relate to one other and where they all fit along the AI and cognitive time continuum. I include a glossary of my top 20 useful AI/cognitive terms — and advice on getting started on your AI/cognitive journey.