Your Digital Avatar May One Day Get Sick Before You Do
Artificial intelligence is everywhere, just not in the way you think it is.
These networks, loosely designed after the human brain, are interconnected computers that have the ability to "learn."
"There's the perception of AI in the glossy magazines," says Anders Kofod-Petersen, a professor of Artificial Intelligence at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. "That's the sci-fi version. It resembles the small guy in the movie AI. It might be benevolent or it might be evil, but it's generally intelligent and conscious."
"And this is, of course, as far from the truth as you can possibly get."
What Exactly Is Artificial Intelligence, Anyway?
Let's start with how you got to this piece. You likely came to it through social media. Your Facebook account, Twitter feed, or perhaps a Google search. AI influences all of those things, machine learning helping to run the algorithms that decide what you see, when, and where. AI isn't the little humanoid figure; it's the system that controls the figure.
"AI is being confused with robotics," Eleonore Pauwels, Director of the Anticipatory Intelligence Lab with the Science and Technology Innovation Program at the Wilson Center, says. "What AI is right now is a data optimization system, a very powerful data optimization system."
The revolution in recent years hasn't come from the method scientists and other researchers use. The general ideas and philosophies have been around since the late 1960s. Instead, the big change has been the dramatic increase in computing power, primarily due to the development of neural networks. These networks, loosely designed after the human brain, are interconnected computers that have the ability to "learn." An AI, for example, can be taught to spot a picture of a cat by looking at hundreds of thousands of pictures that have been labeled "cat" and "learning" what a cat looks like. Or an AI can beat a human at Go, an achievement that just five years ago Kofod-Petersen thought wouldn't be accomplished for decades.
"It's very difficult to argue that something is intelligent if it can't learn, and these algorithms are getting pretty good at learning stuff. What they are not good at is learning how to learn."
Medicine is the field where this expertise in perception tasks might have the most influence. It's already having an impact as iPhones use AI to detect cancer, Apple watches alert the wearer to a heart problem, AI spots tuberculosis and the spread of breast cancer with a higher accuracy than human doctors, and more. Every few months, another study demonstrates more possibility. (The New Yorker published an article about medicine and AI last year, so you know it's a serious topic.)
But this is only the beginning. "I personally think genomics and precision medicine is where AI is going to be the biggest game-changer," Pauwels says. "It's going to completely change how we think about health, our genomes, and how we think about our relationship between our genotype and phenotype."
The Fundamental Breakthrough That Must Be Solved
To get there, however, researchers will need to make another breakthrough, and there's debate about how long that will take. Kofod-Petersen explains: "If we want to move from this narrow intelligence to this broader intelligence, that's a very difficult problem. It basically boils down to that we haven't got a clue about what intelligence actually is. We don't know what intelligence means in a biological sense. We think we might recognize it but we're not completely sure. There isn't a working definition. We kind of agree with the biologists that learning is an aspect of it. It's very difficult to argue that something is intelligent if it can't learn, and these algorithms are getting pretty good at learning stuff. What they are not good at is learning how to learn. They can learn specific tasks but we haven't approached how to teach them to learn to learn."
In other words, current AI is very, very good at identifying that a picture of a cat is, in fact, a cat – and getting better at doing so at an incredibly rapid pace – but the system only knows what a "cat" is because that's what a programmer told it a furry thing with whiskers and two pointy ears is called. If the programmer instead decided to label the training images as "dogs," the AI wouldn't say "no, that's a cat." Instead, it would simply call a furry thing with whiskers and two pointy ears a dog. AI systems lack the explicit inference that humans do effortlessly, almost without thinking.
Pauwels believes that the next step is for AI to transition from supervised to unsupervised learning. The latter means that the AI isn't answering questions that a programmer asks it ("Is this a cat?"). Instead, it's almost like it's looking at the data it has, coming up with its own questions and hypothesis, and answering them or putting them to the test. Combining this ability with the frankly insane processing power of the computer system could result in game-changing discoveries.
In the not-too-distant future, a doctor could run diagnostics on a digital avatar, watching which medical conditions present themselves before the person gets sick in real life.
One company in China plans to develop a way to create a digital avatar of an individual person, then simulate that person's health and medical information into the future. In the not-too-distant future, a doctor could run diagnostics on a digital avatar, watching which medical conditions presented themselves – cancer or a heart condition or anything, really – and help the real-life version prevent those conditions from beginning or treating them before they became a life-threatening issue.
That, obviously, would be an incredibly powerful technology, and it's just one of the many possibilities that unsupervised AI presents. It's also terrifying in the potential for misuse. Even the term "unsupervised AI" brings to mind a dystopian landscape where AI takes over and enslaves humanity. (Pick your favorite movie. There are dozens.) This is a concern, something for developers, programmers, and scientists to consider as they build the systems of the future.
The Ethical Problem That Deserves More Attention
But the more immediate concern about AI is much more mundane. We think of AI as an unbiased system. That's incorrect. Algorithms, after all, are designed by someone or a team, and those people have explicit or implicit biases. Intentionally, or more likely not, they introduce these biases into the very code that forms the basis for the AI. Current systems have a bias against people of color. Facebook tried to rectify the situation and failed. These are two small examples of a larger, potentially systemic problem.
It's vital and necessary for the people developing AI today to be aware of these issues. And, yes, avoid sending us to the brink of a James Cameron movie. But AI is too powerful a tool to ignore. Today, it's identifying cats and on the verge of detecting cancer. In not too many tomorrows, it will be on the forefront of medical innovation. If we are careful, aware, and smart, it will help simulate results, create designer drugs, and revolutionize individualize medicine. "AI is the only way to get there," Pauwels says.
When a patient is diagnosed with early-stage breast cancer, having surgery to remove the tumor is considered the standard of care. But what happens when a patient can’t have surgery?
Whether it’s due to high blood pressure, advanced age, heart issues, or other reasons, some breast cancer patients don’t qualify for a lumpectomy—one of the most common treatment options for early-stage breast cancer. A lumpectomy surgically removes the tumor while keeping the patient’s breast intact, while a mastectomy removes the entire breast and nearby lymph nodes.
Fortunately, a new technique called cryoablation is now available for breast cancer patients who either aren’t candidates for surgery or don’t feel comfortable undergoing a surgical procedure. With cryoablation, doctors use an ultrasound or CT scan to locate any tumors inside the patient’s breast. They then insert small, needle-like probes into the patient's breast which create an “ice ball” that surrounds the tumor and kills the cancer cells.
Cryoablation has been used for decades to treat cancers of the kidneys and liver—but only in the past few years have doctors been able to use the procedure to treat breast cancer patients. And while clinical trials have shown that cryoablation works for tumors smaller than 1.5 centimeters, a recent clinical trial at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York has shown that it can work for larger tumors, too.
In this study, doctors performed cryoablation on patients whose tumors were, on average, 2.5 centimeters. The cryoablation procedure lasted for about 30 minutes, and patients were able to go home on the same day following treatment. Doctors then followed up with the patients after 16 months. In the follow-up, doctors found the recurrence rate for tumors after using cryoablation was only 10 percent.
For patients who don’t qualify for surgery, radiation and hormonal therapy is typically used to treat tumors. However, said Yolanda Brice, M.D., an interventional radiologist at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, “when treated with only radiation and hormonal therapy, the tumors will eventually return.” Cryotherapy, Brice said, could be a more effective way to treat cancer for patients who can’t have surgery.
“The fact that we only saw a 10 percent recurrence rate in our study is incredibly promising,” she said.
Few things are more painful than a urinary tract infection (UTI). Common in men and women, these infections account for more than 8 million trips to the doctor each year and can cause an array of uncomfortable symptoms, from a burning feeling during urination to fever, vomiting, and chills. For an unlucky few, UTIs can be chronic—meaning that, despite treatment, they just keep coming back.
But new research, presented at the European Association of Urology (EAU) Congress in Paris this week, brings some hope to people who suffer from UTIs.
Clinicians from the Royal Berkshire Hospital presented the results of a long-term, nine-year clinical trial where 89 men and women who suffered from recurrent UTIs were given an oral vaccine called MV140, designed to prevent the infections. Every day for three months, the participants were given two sprays of the vaccine (flavored to taste like pineapple) and then followed over the course of nine years. Clinicians analyzed medical records and asked the study participants about symptoms to check whether any experienced UTIs or had any adverse reactions from taking the vaccine.
The results showed that across nine years, 48 of the participants (about 54%) remained completely infection-free. On average, the study participants remained infection free for 54.7 months—four and a half years.
“While we need to be pragmatic, this vaccine is a potential breakthrough in preventing UTIs and could offer a safe and effective alternative to conventional treatments,” said Gernot Bonita, Professor of Urology at the Alta Bro Medical Centre for Urology in Switzerland, who is also the EAU Chairman of Guidelines on Urological Infections.
The news comes as a relief not only for people who suffer chronic UTIs, but also to doctors who have seen an uptick in antibiotic-resistant UTIs in the past several years. Because UTIs usually require antibiotics, patients run the risk of developing a resistance to the antibiotics, making infections more difficult to treat. A preventative vaccine could mean less infections, less antibiotics, and less drug resistance overall.
“Many of our participants told us that having the vaccine restored their quality of life,” said Dr. Bob Yang, Consultant Urologist at the Royal Berkshire NHS Foundation Trust, who helped lead the research. “While we’re yet to look at the effect of this vaccine in different patient groups, this follow-up data suggests it could be a game-changer for UTI prevention if it’s offered widely, reducing the need for antibiotic treatments.”