AI and Medicine by Mike Barlow

Author:Mike Barlow
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
Publisher: O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Published: 2016-07-15T04:00:00+00:00

Pursuing the Quest for Personalized Medicine

The idea of personalized precision medicine has been around for more than two decades, but AI and ML have the potential for bringing it closer to reality. “Personalized medicine is built on the unique genetic characteristics of a patient,” Xing explains. “But it’s very difficult to practice because we don’t really understand the entire mechanisms and genetic underpinnings of many diseases. Also, the data is hard to understand. You have a million polymorphic sites, and you don’t know which one of them is actually causing the disease or just along for the ride.”

Typically, doctors check a handful of key mutations that are generally believed to be associated with a particular patient’s disease — but taking that shortcut effectively circumvents the value of personalized medicine. “When you look at a mutation that is common to many patients with a specific disease, you lose the power of personalization because everyone will be treated the same way,” Xing says.

Xing and his colleagues are building machine learning programs that analyze an individual patient’s genomic, proteomic, and metabolic data — including incremental risk factors — to generate a highly personalized profile for the patient. “You can use machine learning models for deriving the unique patterns underlying specific diseases and symptoms, as well as for identifying potential targets for drugs,” he says.

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