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

From The Virtual Shift, host Tom Foley talks to Dr. Joshua Landy, CMO for Figure 1 and practicing critical care specialist. In 2012, Joshua was invited to become a visiting scholar at Stanford University, where he researched online and multimedia-oriented approaches to health education. Joshua serves as Figure 1’s Chief Medical Officer and continues to practice medicine. Their discussion leads us to the value of Clinical Discussion Support tools coupled with AI and how it can/will influence the delivery of care.

In the News

Philips to Expand its Cardiac Diagnostics and Monitoring Portfolio with the Acquisition of Cardiologs
Royal Philips (@PhilipsHealth), a global company in health technology, announced that it has signed an agreement to acquire Cardiologs (@CardioLogs), a France-based medical technology company focused on transforming cardiac diagnostics using artificial intelligence (AI) and cloud technology. Cardiologs will further strengthen Philips’ cardiac monitoring and diagnostics offering with innovative software technology, electrocardiogram (ECG) analysis and reporting services. The transaction, which is subject to customary closing conditions, is expected to be completed in the coming months. Financial details of the transaction were not disclosed.

GNS Healthcare and Scipher Medicine® Collaborate to Develop World’s First in silico Patient for Rheumatoid Arthritis
GNS Healthcare (@gnshealthcare), an artificial intelligence company creating in silico patients that simulate drug treatment at the individual patient level, and Scipher Medicine (@ScipherMedicine), a precision immunology company matching patients with the most effective therapy, announced plans to develop and launch Gemini — The in silico Patient™ for rheumatoid arthritis (RA), to help patients reach target treatments sooner.

Perimeter Medical Imaging AI Announces Important Milestone in ATLAS AI Project With FDA IDE Approval to Launch Clinical Trial Using Perimeter B-Series OCT With ImgAssist AI in Breast Conservation Surgery
Perimeter Medical Imaging AI, Inc.(@PerimeterMed), a medical technology company driven to transform cancer surgery with ultra-high-resolution, real-time, advanced imaging tools to address high unmet medical needs, announced approval of its Investigational Device Exemption application by the FDA to conduct a multi-center, randomized, double-arm study to evaluate the FDA breakthrough-device-designated Perimeter B-Series OCT imaging system that uses ImgAssist AI technology to identify regions of interest as compared with the current standard of care for patients undergoing breast conservation surgery.

egnite, Inc. Expands Technology to Improve the Quality of Care for Heart Failure Patients
Advancing its application of artificial intelligence and data science to help improve patient care, egnite, Inc. (@egnitehealth) expanded into heart failure for its flagship solution, CardioCare. This expansion leverages real-world insights to help physicians identify at-risk patients with heart failure and a reduced ejection fraction (HFrEF) who are not on guideline-directed medication and could benefit from timely intervention.

Essen Health Care Expands Partnership with MyndYou to Leverage AI-powered Virtual Voice Assistant “MyEleanor” to Connect More Often to Chronic Care Patients
Essen Health Care, a healthcare network and group practice for underserved communities in New York State, announced an expanded partnership with MyndYou (@MyndYou_), a healthcare technology solution provider and creator of MyEleanor, an AI-based virtual care assistant. Following a successful pilot program that began in June, Essen Health Care will expand its use of the MyEleanor platform to call patients and check in on their overall health and wellbeing.

VA Adopts New Artificial Intelligence Strategy to Ensure Trustworthy Use of Technology for Veteran Care
As part of the Department of Veterans Affairs’ (@DeptVetAffairs) efforts to explore the use of artificial intelligence in the delivery of health care and benefits, VA implemented a new AI strategy late September, to serve as a guideline for ethical use of the technology throughout its enterprise. While AI can offer advantages over traditional analytics and clinical decision-making techniques to help improve Veteran care, the department wants to ensure any implementation of the technology is trustworthy and protects Veteran information.

Product & Company News

One Drop Delivers Novel AI-Powered Solution For Cardiovascular Disease Prevention
One Drop (@onedroptoday), a precision health solutions company for people living with chronic conditions worldwide, announced the release of a digital, AI-enabled cardiovascular disease (CVD) prevention module. The new CVD prevention module is the first co-developed digital product to emerge from the collaboration between One Drop and Bayer in support of One Drop’s expansion into a wide range of therapeutic areas.

RSIP Vision Introduces Bladder Panorama Generator and Sparse Reconstruction Tool
RSIP Vision (@RSIPvision), a company that is driving innovation for medical imaging through advanced AI and computer vision solutions, announced a new panoramic image generator and 3D sparse reconstruction tool for bladder imagery. The tool automatically performs accurate stitching of cystoscopy images of the bladder to create a large panoramic image. The sparse reconstruction verifies that no areas of the bladder go unscreened and suspicious areas can be revisited.

AION Labs, Powered by BioMed X, Launches First Global Call for Application: Artificial Intelligence for Antibody Design
AION Labs (@AionLabs), a first-of-its-kind innovation lab spearheading the adoption of AI technologies and computational science to solve therapeutic challenges, and German independent research institute BioMed X, announced the launch of the first global call for application to identify biomedical scientists and inventors to form a new startup at AION Labs’ headquarters in Rehovot, Israel. The chosen AION Labs startup team will be sponsored by several industry-leading partners and supported by the Israel Innovation Authority. The sponsors of this call for application are AstraZeneca, Merck, Pfizer, Teva and the Israel Biotech Fund, with close support from Amazon Web Services.

VisualDx Announces Collaboration with Janssen to Pilot New API and Bring Equitable AI to the Point of Care
VisualDx (@VisualDx), a global company in web-based clinical decision support, announced that it has entered into an agreement with Janssen Biotech, Inc., one of the pharmaceutical companies of Johnson & Johnson. Through this collaboration, the Research & Development data science team at Janssen will leverage the VisualDx application programming interface as a beta partner and the new interface will enable provider organizations and other healthcare technology companies to bring VisualDx’s industry-defining CDS into third-party applications to enhance diagnostic accuracy and improve health outcomes, particularly for traditionally marginalized patient populations.

Quris Closes Critical Drug Development Gaps With New Clinical Prediction AI Platform
Quris, an artificial intelligence (AI) innovator disrupting the pharmaceutical arena, launched the first clinical prediction AI platform to predict which drug candidates will safely work in humans – dramatically improving efficacy and cutting drug development costs. Quris uses AI-powered miniaturized “patients-on-a-chip” toavoid the tremendous risks and costs of failed clinical trials and eliminate the reliance on ineffective animal testing under the scientific leadership of industry visionaries, including Nobel Laureate Aaron Ciechanover and Dr. Robert S. Langer, co-founder of Moderna.

To Read

FDA Review Can Limit Bias Risks in Medical Devices Using Artificial Intelligence – By Liz Richardson, The PEW Charitable Trusts (@pewtrusts) – Artificial intelligence (AI)—broadly defined as the science of developing machines that can simulate human thinking—offers great potential to improve health care and reduce costs. For example, medical professionals and health care systems are starting to use AI to facilitate faster diagnoses, predict the likelihood of a particular patient outcome, and help conduct research on new treatments. But like any medical product, these software tools can also pose risks. The algorithms that underpin AI software may have hidden biases that lead to disparate outcomes for different patient groups, potentially reinforcing long-standing inequities.

Matthew Lamons

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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.

Linguamatics on NLP

What is Text Mining, Text Analytics and Natural Language Processing? – Text mining (also referred to as text analytics) is an artificial intelligence (AI) technology that uses natural language processing (NLP) to transform the free (unstructured) text in documents and databases into normalized, structured data suitable for analysis or to drive machine learning (ML) algorithms.

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.