Listen below to piece broadcast on Drivetime, RTE Radio 1, on 26th September ’19
A report from Casement Aerodome, Dublin, where the defence forces, using the very latest artificial intelligence, drone and robotics technology, simulated a terrorist attack on a rock concert.
The test of the ROCSAFE system – developed by NUI Galway and the Tyndall National Institute, is lead by NUIG’s Prof Michael Madden.
Professor Donal O’Shea, Professor and Head of Department of Chemistry, RCSI
A technology that can light up cancerous cells during surgery promises better post-operative outcomes for patients.
The new technique precisely defines the boundaries of a cancer using chemistry, imaging technology and artificial intelligence by lighting up cancer tissue that is attached to a fluorescent agent.
It has been shown in previous research that artificial intelligence is highly effective – often more effective than human experts – when it comes to analysing medical images.
The research effort was led by Prof Donal O’Shea, Department of Chemistry at the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland (RCSI) and published in the latest edition of Chemical Science.
The surgeons can use the technology to see lit up cancer issue through specialised cameras or microscopes, O’Shea said, and will not have to rely so heavily on their own experience when making decisions as to what tissue needs to be removed.
Tumours
Currently, a surgical team can get access to a variety of different images of a patient’s tumour from technology such as CT scans, or MRI scans. These can help to locate the tumour and its size in advance, but in theatre, the surgeon is on her own.
“Quite often, depending on the tumour, they may be doing it by touch, by trying to feel the different tissues, by their experience, by visually looking at different tissues,” O’Shea said.
The new technology’s real benefit, he said, is that it can help the surgeon make decisions ‘on the spot’ as the operation takes place, and not have to rely so much on their experience alone.
“The way this works is that you would shine light on the [cancer] tissue, and if the fluorescent agent is in the tissue it will emit, or shine, light back at you at a different wavelength,” O’Shea said.
“It means you can take, or capture images, whether pictures or movies, from this fluorescent light which is being emitted from the tissue,” O’Shea said.
“When it is done clinically, or in the laboratory, there are special devices that shine the light, and essentially, there are cameras to capture the image,” O’Shea added.
The new technology can benefit the approximately 60 percent of people with solid cancer tumours – in the lung, breast, or prostate for example – who undergo surgery for their removal.
Success
The success of these operations depends on how effectively the solid cancer is removed and how much healthy tissue remains.
“In most surgeries there isn’t a huge margin of healthy tissue,” O’Shea said. “If you can imagine it is in brain cancer, it is very, very small margins. In breast cancer similarly, there may not be a large amount of tissue that a surgeon wants to take.”
“It’s the surgical team’s decisions they are making in real time during the operations as to, do we take this portion of the tissue, or that portion of the tissue.”
The researchers aim to also use the technology to help surgeons identify whether a solid cancer has spread in a patient.
“If there was metastasis in a nearby lymph node perhaps we could detect that with our imaging agent during the surgery,” O’Shea said.
Prof O’Shea is collaborating with Prof Ronan Cahill, a colorectal surgeon in the Mater University Hospital and IBM Research in Dublin to get the technology into clinical trials in three years.
Professor Kathleen Richardson, who will give a talk in UCD in November, is Director of the Campaign Against Sex Robots (Source: UCD)
The advance of AI, robotics, and other new technologies are leading to an unprecedented transformation of the human world.
The plotting the future series of public lectures at UCD is seeking to explore how the place of humans in the world is changing, and the implications of that.
Kathleen Richardson, Professor of Ethics and Culture of Robotics and AI, De Montfort University Leicester will deliver the fifth lecture in the series on the 9th November with a talk entitled ‘Turning Persons into Property and Property into Persons’.
Kathleen Richardson is the Director of the Campaign Against Sex Robots and Senior Research Fellow in Ethics of Robotics and part of the Europe-wide DREAM project (Development of Robot-Enhance Therapy for Children with AutisM).
Kathleen is author of An Anthropology of Robots and AI: Annihilation Anxiety and Machines. She is now working on her second manuscript The Robot Intermediary? An Anthropology of Attachment and Robots for Children with Autism.
This is a public lecture and all are welcome, but registration is required in advance. To register visit http://www.ucd.ie/humanities/events/plottingthefuture/
‘Good afternoon, the AI will see you now.” This could be the future of family practice medicine as machines become better equipped to do many of the things that traditionally made up the GP’s job description.
Machines have always threatened human jobs, but up to the 21st century they were only a serious threat to repetitive, low-skilled jobs. Times have changed and the higher skilled jobs today are threatened by the advance of artificial intelligence (AI). In the past few years, intelligent machines have begun to perform complex tasks far better and quicker than intelligent, skilled humans.
The ‘good GP’ we know will always know his patients well; their medical history, their personality, details about their family and their foibles, and will retain this background information and call on it when assessing patients. The good GP would know, for example, that Mr Murphy is probably upset, rather than clinically depressed, because his father died last week and he has no depression history.
However, unlike the good GP, who may be overworked, and stressed by the demands of a busy clinic, computers with built-in AI have an almost unlimited capacity to store information in medical records, and to recognise patterns that may have been missed by the GP. They are also excellent at measuring things, such as blood pressure, and analysing results, such as a routine blood test.
In recent years, scientists working in AI made a breakthrough when they developed software based on the working of the human brain, rather than, as was the case before, sticking to a rigid rule book. This software could learn from the environment, making mistakes, and correcting them, like a child learns. The world saw its first artificial ‘self-learning systems’.
There were implications from this for the GP, and other professionals, as suddenly it wasn’t just the old story of machines replacing low-skilled workers; their jobs were on the line too. GPs faced the prospect of being confined to a decreasing number of areas where they are still superior to artificial rivals, or worse still, to become redundant; a charming medical relic of a bygone age.
The role of specialist medical consultants – not just GPs – is also coming under threat too from sophisticated ‘deep learning systems’ which are already outperforming doctors in specialised areas of medicine, says Professor Barry O’Sullivan, director of the Insight Centre for Data Analytics at the Department of Computer Science, in University College Cork, and a leading AI researcher.
“Dermatology is one such field,” he says. “A very recent paper that appeared in (research journal) Nature showed that a deep learning system could outperform human dermatologists at identifying skin cancer by quite a margin.”
Another area where AI is already better than doctors is radiology, adds O’Sullivan. A radiologist can recognise patterns in scans, based on years of experience. However, no matter how experienced the radiologist, he can’t store the amount of scans that AI can, while comparing them to a particular scan in order to assess, for example, the likelihood of a stroke or epilepsy. Meanwhile, there are further reasons for GPs not to be cheerful about the future with plans in the UK, supported by the NHS, to use smartphones to bypass the GP clinic altogether. A pilot scheme, run by private firm Babylon Health is encouraging people to consult a ‘chatbot’, equipped with AI, rather than a human being when they contact the 111 non-emergency line.
Patients key in symptoms, and AI determines how urgent each case is, and whether the user should be told to go straight to A&E, the chemist or simply go home to bed. The AI system makes decisions based on 300 million pieces of information, and the company says trials have shown the system is faster and more accurate than doctors. Certainly, most experts agree the future of medicine is ‘personalised medicine’, with disease treatments being tailored to suit personal needs. This is an area that AI excels, as it is very good at looking at medical data and finding specific treatments for patients which can, in some cases, even save their lives.
“For example, organisations such as Cancer Commons have assisted cancer patients survive conditions that were regarded as fatal in their situations by combining AI with extremely rich and individual-level data,” says Prof O’Sullivan. “The founder of Cancer Commons, Marty Tenenbaum, is one such survivor.”
Brendan Kelly, professor of psychiatry at Trinity College Dublin, says: “Computers and electronic diagnostic aids are delivering more and more information every year in medicine. And it is likely that computers and other devices, with their essentially infinite data storage and pattern recognition abilities, will continue to add increasing value to medical care.
He adds: “AI is especially useful in diagnosis: recognising skin lesions, monitoring measurable indices of body function, and identifying known patterns of symptoms and signs.
“It is less useful for other dimensions of medical care: contextualising findings in the context of the patient’s life, moving from recognising a pattern to agreeing a narrative between doctor and patient, and providing reassurance.
“AI is also less useful for picking up on the unexpected elements in a patient’s presentation: noting, for example, that a patient presenting with a lesion on his ear also has swollen ankles. Or noticing that someone with chest pain smells strongly of alcohol at 11 in the morning and might have an alcohol problem (which might or might not be related to the chest pain). Or noticing that a woman who comes to have a prescription renewed brings along her child, whom the nurse remembers has missed a vaccination, and can receive it today.”
Kelly isn’t worried about his job just yet though.
“Medicine has always welcomed new technologies and benefited hugely from them: stethoscopes, x-ray machines, MRI. But these tools amplify the effectiveness of healthcare professionals, rather than replacing them.”
Dr Mark Murphy, GP, and chair of Communications with the Irish College of General Practitioners, responds:
“It is unlikely that AI will make a meaningful difference in the GP setting, given the significant human factors at play in a consultation.
“There is a requirement for the GP to conduct face-to-face consultation to develop a rapport, to physically examine a patient and read nonverbal cues.”
“AI systems cannot get rid of the complex uncertainty and greyness at the heart of the undifferentiated presentations to General Practice.
“However, AI and machine learning will help with the handling of information in the healthcare system, and may be able to assist with complicated ‘black and white’ diagnostic process, such as imaging or to make sense of the complex genomic factors with rare-disease treatment.”
Irish Independent
