Articulate Medical Intelligence Explorer (AMIE)

Anyone who has ever had to sit in a waiting room for a long time might appreciate Google’s newest innovation.

Google DeepMind is introducing the Articulate Medical Intelligence Explorer, or AMIE. AMIE is a medical AI assistant that takes a patient’s history and symptoms and determines a diagnosis with incredible accuracy.

According to the subjects who tested AMIE, the AI surpassed real doctors in 24 out of 26 different metrics, including empathy.

How Does Articulate Medical Intelligence Explorer Work?

A patient will tell the medical intelligence explorer what symptoms they’re experiencing. AMIE will take the patient’s history and evaluate the symptoms. After, it will ask a series of questions until it determines a diagnosis. By the time the patient reaches a human doctor, the initial diagnostic conversation will already be done. The doctor will be free to move on to the next step of treating the patient.

The exact nature of the hardware hasn’t yet been revealed. However, Google and DeepMind are promising a user-friendly, text-chat-based experience. It will be available in a wide variety of medical clinics, much like 3D printing in hospitals.

How Does the Articulate Medical Explorer Help Doctors?

Google’s Articulate Medical Intelligence Explorer will streamline the treatment of patients by diagnosing a problem so that the doctor can get straight to the treatment needed.

The conversation between a doctor and a patient is more complicated than one might realize. In one go, doctors need to:

• Have extensive medical knowledge.
• Have the ability to instantly analyze the patient’s responses.
• Pick out the key information that will lead to the next question.
• Diagnose a patient correctly.

That seems like a lot to ask of an AI, but AMIE does it so well, that people hired to test the program have rated it to be as good as a real-life physician. And in some cases, even better. 

How Was AMIE Developed?

Google DeepMind’s Articulate Medical Intelligence Explorer, or AMIE, was fed transcripts of almost 100,000 real-life conversations between doctors and patients. As well, they included detailed summaries of notes from intensive care unit cases and thousands of questions from the United States Medical Licensing Examination.

It would take the average human years to absorb that much information and it still wouldn’t be enough. That’s because these kinds of human interactions can be imprecise, full of unnecessary detail, and incomplete. 

The research team also developed a continuous cycle of examination and critical analysis to allow AMIE to continue to grow and develop with each interaction.

AMIE Surpassed Doctors in Empathy

Subjects underwent Diagnostic conversations with AMIE. They were not told whether they were talking to a human doctor or articulate medical AI. They were then asked to evaluate their experience on 26 different metrics such as accuracy and efficiency. 

The patients rated AMIE over a real-life doctor in 24 out of 26 of those metrics. Amazingly, one of those metrics where the AI system outranked the human doctor, was empathy.

One can only imagine if, in the future, Organoid Intelligence is brought into the mix.

Will Articulate Medical Intelligence Replace Doctors?

While Google’s Medical Explorer was rated higher than real doctors in 24 different metrics, it’s important to understand that Google’s medical AI will only complement the work of human doctors. It won’t be a replacement. No matter how good the AMIE system is, there are things a computer just can’t replace.

Benefits of Articulate Medical Explorer

Google and DeepMind’s Articulate Medical Intelligence Explorer can:

• Reduce patient wait times.
• provide quick and accurate alternatives to in-person care.
• Lead doctors to quicker and more accurate conclusions.
• Provide medical care in remote areas where medical staff is limited. 

However, the researchers have not lost sight of AMIE’s limitations.

Cons of Articulate Medical Explorer

Although the Articulate Medical Intelligence Explorer was rated higher than human doctors in 24 different metrics, AI lacks the instinct to handle delicate situations required for issues like ethics. Some cons include the following:

• It may take time for doctors to leave something as important as medical care in the virtual hands of an AI.
• AMIE is limited only to the knowledge fed to it.
• It still needs to be more advanced to provide a diagnosis for complex queries.

It’s safe to say that human medical personnel will be around for a long time to come.

The Future of AMIE

AMIE’s future as a diagnostic tool is incredibly promising. It has the potential to revolutionize the way patients experience healthcare on a global scale.

It’s very important to remember, however, that AMIE is still only at the research stage. There’s plenty more fine-tuning and testing to do. Researchers also recognize the critical importance of moving forward with caution. AMIE might become a common feature in clinics and hospitals in the future.

How Many Viruses are in the Human Body?

There are approximately 10 Trillion viruses in a single human body. That is 10x the amount of money lost yearly from food waste in the U.S. alone.

You’d think that you would be very sick or even dead, right?

Wrong!

It turns out that viruses aren’t entirely the super villains they’ve been painted to be; there are benefits of viruses that often go unnoticed, but which play an important role in our healthcare.

For years, news has been focused on the disease-causing side of viruses, but the disease-preventing side of viruses are playing a crucial role in the world today. This role will become even bigger with advances in AI and Organoid Intelligence.

Here are 3 mind-blowing benefits of viruses that you should know!

Viruses Help Cure Cancer

Cancer cells don’t have strong antiviral defences, making them vulnerable to infections. Viral infections can sometimes lead to certain cancers. For instance, HPV (Human Papillomavirus) is implicated to cause cervical cancer.

On the other hand, this means that viruses can also kill cancer cells. If they are used by researchers to specifically target these cancer cells, then viruses can even help cure cancer.

While the benefits of viruses include killing cancer cells, the only problem is that these viruses can also kill healthy cells in the process.

How Can Viruses Cure Cancer?

Oncolytic viruses (OVs) are viruses that kill tumors. While Oncolytic viruses can be found in nature, they are also modified by scientists to attack tumours without harming healthy cells.

Oncolytic viruse therapy is a cancer treatment that uses OVs to target cancer cells over healthy cells. It does this by activating a ‘danger signals” that makes tumours less immune to viruses.

The result is an effective treatment that can help viruses cure cancer.

Viruses Treat Genetic Disorders

Among the benefits of viruses is that they treat genetic disorders. Viruses are very good at delivering genetic materials into cells, which make them useful for gene therapy. Scientists have developed what are called “viral vectors”. Viral vectors are tools that use modified viruses to transport a functional gene to cells that need them. When the cells receive these genes, they begin to function properly and could be used to treat genetic disorders.

How do Viruses Help With Gene Therapy?

Before a virus is used as a viral vector, it is “defanged”. Like the name suggests, to defang means to remove the part of something that could be dangerous. By defanging a virus and using it as a vehicle to deliver genes to cells, viruses can treat genetic disorders in ways that do not harm the cells.

Among the genetic disorders that viruses can help treat are sickle cell disease (SCD) and Leber congenital amaurosis (LSA).

• Sickle cell disease (SCD): SCD is a disorder where hemoglobin is defective in red blood cells. Hemoglobin is used to deliver oxygen to the blood. With SCD, hemoglobin molecules stick together, causing a variety of serious issues. By using viruses in gene therapy, a modified hemoglobin gene is delivered to the red blood cells as treatment.
• Leber congenital amaurosis (LSA): LSA is a rare and inherited eye disease that causes vision loss early in life. Virus vectors have been shown to be successful in reversing the retinal diseases. One such case was Carlene Knight, who began to see colours again after treatment.

Viruses Create Vaccines

Viruses are often used to create vaccines. Vaccines contain weakened forms of the virus they hope to prevent. By giving someone a vaccine with a weakened form of a virus, an immune response is triggered without the person receiving the disease. This trigger will allow the body to learn how to fight off the infection without overreacting. The result is that when the immune system comes into contact with the virus again, it is prepared to destroy the virus quickly and efficiently.

The most clear benefits of viruses to humans can be found by looking at the chickenpox vaccine. The chicken pox vaccine was created by Dr. Michiaki Takahashi in the 1970s and uses a weakened form of varicella virus. The vaccine has since saved millions of people.  

The Benefits of Viruses in the Future

The human microbiome is a community of microorganisms that live in our body. Your body is a superorganism that includes cells that cohabit with fungi, bacteria, and, most abundant of all, viruses. However, until a decade ago, scientists didn’t know much about the human virome — the viruses that inhabit us. 

Today, they’ve barely scratched the surface, but at least they understand that the virome is a critical part of your microbiome. Virus benefits can be found in every corner you check. You’ve got viruses on your skin, mouth, blood, lungs; everywhere.

Mohammadsharif Tabebordbar is among the scientists dedicating his life to studying the benefits of viruses to humans. He even led the creation of an experimental gene therapy that treats genetic muscle disorders. 

“When I hear the word virus, I’m not scared anymore,” Tabebordbar aptly told the Harvard Medicine Magazine. “I ask, ‘Okay, what type of virus? What does it do? What are the implications?'”

Viruses are crucial to our survival. They support much of life on our planet, and without viruses, life on Earth as we know it would cease to exist.

3D Printing in Hospitals

Using 3D printing in hospitals is revolutionizing healthcare. In 2013, only three hospitals worldwide had a 3D printing facility. In 2019, that number increased to 113.

The number of hospitals that use 3D printing technology continues to rise. This is because using 3D printing in hospitals can reduce costs and save lives.

3D printing gives a clear view of surgical margins before surgery is underwent. In fact, this technology has reduced breast cancer re-excision rates by 50%.

How Does 3D Printing in Hospitals Save Lives?

3D printing in hospitals saves lives by allowing surgeons to practice before doing the surgery. When a patient requires complex surgery, 3D printers can create realistic parts of the human anatomy. Surgeons then use these parts for practice to sharpen their skills.

Barcelona-based SJD Children’s Hospital has saved the lives of many children using this method.

“The use of 3D printing in healthcare has represented a fundamental milestone compared to the use of 2D images,” says the head of SJD’s Neurosurgery Department Dr. José Hinojosa Mena-Bernal. “And now Stratasys’ 3D printing technology is taking a further step forward.”

We couldn’t agree more!

How is 3D Printing used in the Medical Field?

3D printing has been used in the medical field to create realistic human anatomy. Doctors use this anatomy to map out the safest routes for executing a complex surgery. These routes may have gone undiscovered if 3D printing technology had not been used.

SJD Children’s Hospital recently saved the life of a nine-year-old boy with an extremely complex and rare disease. The procedure required doctors to remove a malignant tumor. When the doctors looked at the MRI, they thought that they would have to take an invasive pathway to reach the tumour. This invasive pathway would most likely disrupt the spine and would require another surgery afterwards.

However, after the MRI, they decided to explore possible pathways using the 3D model of the anatomy, and what they discovered was amazing!

They discovered a new pathway for reaching the tumour that would keep them from doing another surgery on the boy. This pathway would only need an endoscopic approach through the nostrils.

The doctors managed to avoid contact with any vital organs surrounding the tumour, and no surgery was required afterwards.

Talk about a blast of hope and relief!

The 3D Printing Device Used in SJD Children’s Hospital

The 3D printer used in the SJD Children’s Hospital—the J5 Medijet—is very sophisticated. The color and texture it uses to create a 3D human anatomy replica can even mimic vascular systems. Vascular systems are very thin, and close precision could make all the difference in the world. This makes practice very important for surgeons.

3D printing in hospitals has now become a wonderful reality that will continue to save lives.