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Artificial intelligence and machine learning will play an even bigger role in healthcare in 2020 than they did in 2019, helping medical professionals with everything from oncology screenings to note-taking.

On top of actual deployments, increased investment activity is also expected this year, and with deeper deployments of AI and ML technology, a broader base of test cases will be available to collect valuable best practices information.

As AI is implemented more widely in real-world clinical practice, there will be more academic reports on the clinical benefits that have arisen from the real-world use, said Pete Durlach, senior vice president for healthcare strategy and new business development at Nuance.

"With healthy clinical evidence, we'll see AI become more mainstream in various clinical settings, creating a positive feedback loop of more evidence-based research and use in the field," he explained. "Soon, it will be hard to imagine a doctor's visit, or a hospital stay that doesn't incorporate AI in numerous ways."

In addition, AI and ambient sensing technology will help re-humanize medicine by allowing doctors to focus less on paperwork and administrative functions, and more on patient care.

"As AI becomes more commonplace in the exam room, everything will be voice enabled, people will get used to talking to everything, and doctors will be able to spend 100% of their time focused on the patient, rather than entering data into machines," Durlach predicted. "We will see the exam room of the future where clinical documentation writes itself."

The adoption of AI for robotic process automation ("RPA") for common and high value administrative functions such as the revenue cycle, supply chain and patient scheduling also has the potential to rapidly increase as AI helps automate or partially automate components of these functions, driving significantly enhanced financial outcomes to provider organizations.

Durlach also noted the fear that AI will replace doctors and clinicians has dissipated, and the goal now is to figure out how to incorporate AI as another tool to help physicians make the best care decisions possible effectively augmenting the intelligence of the clinician.

"However, we will still need to protect against phenomenon like alert fatigue, which occurs when users who are faced with many low-level alerts, ignore alerts of all levels, thereby missing crucial ones that can affect the health and safety of patients," he cautioned.

In the next few years, he predicts the market will see a technology that finds a balance between being too obtrusive while supporting doctors to make the best decisions for their patients as the learn to trust the AI powered suggestions and recommendations.

"So many technologies claim they have an AI component, but often there's a blurred line in which the term AI is used in a broad sense, when the technology that's being described is actually basic analytics or machine learning," Kuldeep Singh Rajput, CEO and founder of Boston-based Biofourmis, told Healthcare IT News. "Health system leaders looking to make investments in AI should ask for real-world examples of how the technology is creating ROI for other organizations."

For example, he pointed to a study of Brigham & Women's Home Hospital program, recently published in Annals of Internal Medicine, which employed AI-driven continuous monitoring combined with advanced physiology analytics and related clinical care as a substitute for usual hospital care.

The study found that the program--which included an investment in AI-driven predictive analytics as a key component--reduced costs, decreased healthcare use, and lowered readmissions while increasing physical activity compared with usual hospital care.

"Those types of outcomes could be replicated by other healthcare organizations, which makes a strong clinical and financial case to invest in that type of AI," Rajput said.

Nathan Eddy is a healthcare and technology freelancer based in Berlin.Email the writer:nathaneddy@gmail.comTwitter:@dropdeaded209

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AI and machine learning trends to look toward in 2020 - Healthcare IT News

For more than a decade, Facebook and Google algorithms have been learning as much as they can about you. Its how they refine their systems to deliver the news you read, those puppy videos you love, and the political ads you engage with.

These same kinds of algorithms can be used to find billions of molecules and catalyze important chemical reactions that are currently induced with expensive and toxic metals, says Steven A. Lopez, an assistant professor of chemistry and chemical biology at Northeastern.

Lopez is working with a team of researchers to train machine learning algorithms to spot the molecular patterns that could help find new molecules in bulk, and fast. Its a much smarter approach than scanning through billionsand billionsof molecules without a streamlined process.

Were teaching the machines to learn the chemistry knowledge that we have, Lopez says. Why should I just have the chemical intuition for myself?

The alternative to using expensive metals is organic molecules, and particularly plastics, which are everywhere, Lopez says. Depending on their molecular structure and ability to absorb light, these plastics can be converted with chemistry to produce better materials for todays most important problems.

Lopez says the goal is to find molecules with the right properties and similar structures as metal catalysts. But to attain that goal, Lopez will need to explore an enormous number of molecules.

Thus far, scientists have been able to synthesize only about a million molecules. But conservative estimates of the number of possible molecules that could be analyzed is a quintillion, which is 10 raised to the power of 18, or the number one followed by 18 zeros.

Lopez thinks of this enormous number of possibilities as a vast ocean made up of billions of unexplored molecules. Such an immense molecular space is practically impossible to navigateeven if scientists were to combine experiments with supercomputer analysis.

Lopez says all of the calculations that have ever been done by computers add up to about a billion, or 10 to the ninth power. Thats about a million times less than the possible molecules.

Forget it, theres no chance, he says. We just have to use a smarter search technique.

Thats why Lopez is leading a team, supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation, that includes research from Tufts University, Washington University in St. Louis, Drexel University, and Colorado School of Mines. The team is using an open-access database of organic molecules called VERDE materials DB, which Lopez and colleagues recently published, to improve their algorithms and find more useful molecules.

The database will also register newly found molecules, and can serve as a data hub of information for researchers across several different domains, Lopez says. Thats because it can launch researchers toward finding different molecules with many new properties and applications.

In tandem with the database, the algorithms will allow scientists to use computational resources more efficiently. After molecules of interest are found, researchers will recalibrate the algorithm to find more similar groups of molecules.

The active-search algorithm, developed by Roman Garnett at Washington University in St. Louis, uses a process similar to the classic board game Battleship, in which two players guess hidden locations off a grid to target and destroy vessels within a naval fleet.

In that grid, players place vessels as far apart as possible to make opponents miss targets. Once a ship is hit, players can readjust their strategy and redirect their attacks to the coordinates surrounding that hit.

Thats exactly how Lopez thinks of the concept of exploring a vast ocean of molecules.

We are looking for regions within this ocean, he says. We are starting to set up the coordinates of all the possible molecules.

Hitting the right candidate molecules might also expand the understanding that chemists have of this unexplored chemical space.

Maybe well find out through this analysis that we have something really at the edge of what we call the ocean, and that we can expand this ocean out a bit more in that region, Lopez says. Those are things that we wouldnt [be able to find by searching] with a brute force, trial-and-error kind of approach.

For media inquiries, please contact Jessica Hair at j.hair@northeastern.edu or 617-373-5718.

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Chemists are training machine learning algorithms used by Facebook and Google to find new molecules - News@Northeastern

Constraint solvers take a set of hard and soft constraints in an organization and formulate the most effective plan, taking into account real-time problems.

When a business looks to implement an artificial intelligence strategy, even proper expertise can be too narrow. Its what has led many businesses to deploy machine learning or neural networks to solve problems that require other forms of AI, like constraint solvers.

Constraint solvers take a set of hard and soft constraints in an organization and formulate the most effective plan, taking into account real-time problems. It is the best solution for businesses that have timetabling, assignment or efficiency issues.

In a RedHat webinar, principal software engineer, Geoffrey De Smet, ran through three use cases for constraint solvers.

Vehicle Routing

Efficient delivery management is something Amazon has seemingly perfected, so much so its now an annoyance to have to wait 3-5 days for an item to be delivered. Using RedHats OptaPlanner, businesses can improve vehicle routing by 9 to 18 percent, by optimizing routes and ensuring drivers are able to deliver an optimal amount of goods.

To start, OptaPlanner takes in all the necessary constraints, like truck capacity and driver specialization. It also takes into account regional laws, like the amount of time a driver is legally allowed to drive per day and creates a route for all drivers in the organization.

SEE ALSO: Machine Learning Algorithms Help Couples Conceive

In a practical case, De Smet said RedHat saved a technical vehicle routing company over $100 million in savings per year with the constraint solver. Driving time was reduced by 25 percent and the business was able to reduce its headcount by 10,000.

The benefits [of OptaPlanner] are to reduce cost, improve customer satisfaction, employee well-being and save the planet, said De Smet. The nice thing about some of these are theyre complementary, for example reducing travel time also reduces fuel consumption.

Employee timetabling

Knowing who is covering what shift can be an infuriating task for managers, with all the requests for time off, illness and mandatory days off. In a place where 9 to 5 isnt regular, it can be even harder to keep track of it all.

RedHats OptaPlanner is able to take all of the hard constraints (two days off per week, no more than eight-hour shifts) and soft constraints (should have up to 10 hours rest between shifts) and can formulate a timetable that takes all that into account. When someone asks for a day off, OptaPlanner is able to reassign workers in real-time.

De Smet said this is useful for jobs that need to run 24/7, like hospitals, the police force, security firms, and international call centers. According to RedHats simulation, it should improve employee well-being by 19 to 85 percent, alongside improvements in retention and customer satisfaction.

Task assignment

Even within a single business department, there are skills only a few employees have. For instance, in a call center, only a few will be able to speak fluently in both English and French. To avoid customer annoyance, it is imperative for employees with the right skill-set to be assigned correctly.

With OptaPlanner, managers are able to add employee skills and have the AI assign employees correctly. Using the call center example again, a bilingual advisor may take all calls in French for one day when theres a high demand for it, but on others have a mix of French and English.

For customer support, the constraint solver would be able to assign a problem to the correct advisor, or to the next best thing, before the customer is connected, thus avoiding giving out the wrong advice or having to pass the customer on to another advisor.

In the webinar, De Smet said that while the constraint solver is a valuable asset for businesses looking to reduce costs, this shouldnt be their only aim.

Without having all stakeholders involved in the implementation, the AI could end up harming other areas of the business, like customer satisfaction or employee retention. This is a similar warning given from all analysts on AI implementation it needs to come from a genuine desire to improve the business to get the best outcome.

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Forget Machine Learning, Constraint Solvers are What the Enterprise Needs - - RTInsights

Yi-ming Li,1,* Li-cheng Jiang,2,* Jing-jing He,1 Kai-yu Jia,1 Yong Peng,1 Mao Chen1

1Department of Cardiology, West China Hospital, Sichuan University, Chengdu, Peoples Republic of China; 2Department of Cardiology, The First Affiliated Hospital, Chengdu Medical College, Chengdu, Peoples Republic of China

*These authors contributed equally to this work

Correspondence: Yong Peng; Mao ChenDepartment of Cardiology, West China Hospital, Sichuan University, 37 Guoxue Street, Chengdu 610041, Peoples Republic of ChinaEmail pengyongcd@126.com; hmaochen@vip.sina.com

Abstract: A formal risk assessment for identifying high-risk patients is essential in clinical practice and promoted in guidelines for the management of anterior acute myocardial infarction. In this study, we sought to evaluate the performance of different machine learning models in predicting the 1-year mortality rate of anterior ST-segment elevation myocardial infarction (STEMI) patients and to compare the utility of these models to the conventional Global Registry of Acute Coronary Events (GRACE) risk scores. We enrolled all of the patients aged >18 years with discharge diagnoses of anterior STEMI in the Western China Hospital, Sichuan University, from January 2011 to January 2017. A total of 1244 patients were included in this study. The mean patient age was 63.812.9 years, and the proportion of males was 78.4%. The majority (75.18%) received revascularization therapy. In the prediction of the 1-year mortality rate, the areas under the curve (AUCs) of the receiver operating characteristic curves (ROCs) of the six models ranged from 0.709 to 0.942. Among all models, XGBoost achieved the highest accuracy (92%), specificity (99%) and f1 score (0.72) for predictions with the full variable model. After feature selection, XGBoost still obtained the highest accuracy (93%), specificity (99%) and f1 score (0.73). In conclusion, machine learning algorithms can accurately predict the rate of death after a 1-year follow-up of anterior STEMI, especially the XGBoost model.

Keywords: machine learning, prediction model, acute anterior myocardial infarction

This work is published and licensed by Dove Medical Press Limited. The full terms of this license are available at https://www.dovepress.com/terms.php and incorporate the Creative Commons Attribution - Non Commercial (unported, v3.0) License.By accessing the work you hereby accept the Terms. Non-commercial uses of the work are permitted without any further permission from Dove Medical Press Limited, provided the work is properly attributed. For permission for commercial use of this work, please see paragraphs 4.2 and 5 of our Terms.

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Machine Learning to Predict the 1-Year Mortality Rate After Acute Ante | TCRM - Dove Medical Press

MIT boffins have devised a software-based tool for predicting how processors will perform when executing code for specific applications.

In three papers released over the past seven months, ten computer scientists describe Ithemal (Instruction THroughput Estimator using MAchine Learning), a tool for predicting the number processor clock cycles necessary to execute an instruction sequence when looped in steady state, and include a supporting benchmark and algorithm.

Throughput stats matter to compiler designers and performance engineers, but it isn't practical to make such measurements on-demand, according to MIT computer scientists Saman Amarasinghe, Eric Atkinson, Ajay Brahmakshatriya, Michael Carbin, Yishen Chen, Charith Mendis, Yewen Pu, Alex Renda, Ondrej Sykora, and Cambridge Yang.

So most systems rely on analytical models for their predictions. LLVM offers a command-line tool called llvm-mca that can presents a model for throughput estimation, and Intel offers a closed-source machine code analyzer called IACA (Intel Architecture Code Analyzer), which takes advantage of the company's internal knowledge about its processors.

Michael Carbin, a co-author of the research and an assistant professor and AI researcher at MIT, told the MIT News Service on Monday that performance model design is something of a black art, made more difficult by Intel's omission of certain proprietary details from its processor documentation.

The Ithemal paper [PDF], presented in June at the International Conference on Machine Learning, explains that these hand-crafted models tend to be an order of magnitude faster than measuring basic block throughput sequences of instructions without branches or jumps. But building these models is a tedious, manual process that's prone to errors, particularly when processor details aren't entirely disclosed.

Using a neural network, Ithemal can learn to predict throughout using a set of labelled data. It relies on what the researchers describe as "a hierarchical multiscale recurrent neural network" to create its prediction model.

"We show that Ithemals learned model is significantly more accurate than the analytical models, dropping the mean absolute percent error by more than 50 per cent across all benchmarks, while still delivering fast estimation speeds," the paper explains.

A second paper presented in November at the IEEE International Symposium on Workload Characterization, "BHive: A Benchmark Suite and Measurement Framework for Validating x86-64 Basic Block Performance Models," describes the BHive benchmark for evaluating Ithemal and competing models, IACAm llvm-mca, and OSACA (Open Source Architecture Code Analyzer). It found Ithemal outperformed other models except on vectorized basic blocks.

And in December at the NeurIPS conference, the boffins presented a third paper titled Compiler Auto-Vectorization with Imitation Learning that describes a way to automatically generate compiler optimizations in a way that outperforms LLVMs SLP vectorizer.

The academics argue that their work shows the value of machine learning in the context of performance analysis.

"Ithemal demonstrates that future compilation and performance engineering tools can be augmented with datadriven approaches to improve their performance and portability, while minimizing developer effort," the paper concludes.

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Finally, a good use for AI: Machine-learning tool guesstimates how well your code will run on a CPU core - The Register