A cancer diagnosis can be a devastating event. And for patients suffering from brain cancer, the diagnosis carries extra weight. It’s not just the disease that’s taxing — treatment itself can be grueling on both the body and the spirit.
In a bid to improve quality of life for cancer patients, a team of researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has turned to machine learning to help avoid toxicity from cancer medications. The researchers are specifically targeting glioblastoma, the most aggressive form of brain cancer, which carries a prognosis in adults of less than five years.
Cancer therapies are tough, combining multiple drugs with radiation treatment — a cocktail that can cause crippling side effects. The goal of the MIT project is to use artificial intelligence to figure out the fewest and smallest doses of medication that could still be effective. That way side effects are kept to a minimum.
To pinpoint the smallest effective doses, the MIT team trained their A.I. on models of treatment regimens that are currently in use, adjusting the dosage until it could identify an optimal treatment protocol that carries the lowest potency and frequency for a tumor of a given size. The system simulated 50 trials on patients and managed to decrease the dosage by up to a half of the doctor-recommended doses.
The A.I. was trained using a method called reinforced learning, similar to how trainers teach pets to obey commands. Do the right action, get a reward. Do the wrong action, don’t get a reward (or even a reprimand). For the A.I., the award wasn’t a treat but a positive or negative number that signaled to the algorithm its success.
The A.I. isn’t meant to take over the jobs of physicians altogether. Rather, it’s meant to guide physicians towards offering more suitable treatment options.
“The recommendations from the algorithm can be used by human experts to design safer and more effective clinical trials,” Pratik Shah, a principal investigator at MIT who supervised the research, told Digital Trends. “These digital algorithmic systems may also inform and educate individual patients about potential trajectories their diseases could take in response to treatments.”
A.I. is becoming increasingly valued in healthcare, and is being applied to everything from discovering new medications to diagnosing diseases.
The MIT research will be presented this week at the 2018 Machine Learning for Healthcare conference at Stanford University.
Google has been finding more ways to make Gemini a part of your daily routine, from putting together playlists to ordering groceries through your favorite apps. Now it's expanding those capabilities to more services, with Google Search joining in, too.
The company has announced a new Connected Apps Platform that makes it easier for developers to bring their services to both Gemini and Search. Alongside this, Google is adding new partners to its growing lineup, bringing more of the apps people already use into its AI ecosystem.
In the broad context of AI and its perceived harms, health and medical risks often pop up in the conversation. The warnings even come from frontier AI labs, such as ChatGPT-maker OpenAI and Anthropic, both of which have warned about misusing AI to cook up bioweapons. Security experts have already spotted a few such incidents in the wild, especially with the usage of AI models without any solid guardrails.
Well, it appears that the risks run deeper. As per an analysis appearing in the British Medical Journal (BMJ), AI bots are now being deployed to influence public policies governing health risks to citizens. In this instance, an attempt was made using AI bots to thwart regulations that aim to restrict the sale of disposable vapes, all while disguising the manipulation efforts as a response from real humans.
What if checking your drinking water for dangerous chemicals were as simple as plugging a tiny gadget into your smartphone? Researchers in Japan have developed a compact sensor that could make that possible, potentially bringing sophisticated water contamination testing out of expensive laboratories and into people's hands.
Scientists at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (OIST) have created a portable device capable of detecting extremely low concentrations of PFAS, commonly known as "forever chemicals." The findings were published in the journal Biosensors and Bioelectronics, which demonstrate how an inexpensive sensor and a smartphone could make identifying potentially harmful chemicals in water a lot easier.