Potential of Artificial Intelligence to Accelerate Drug Development for Rare Diseases.

The growth in breadth and depth of artificial intelligence (AI) applications has been fast, running hand in hand with the increasing amount of digital data available. Here, we comment on the application of AI in the field of drug development, with a strong focus on the specific achievements and challenges posed by rare diseases. Data paucity and high costs make drug development for rare diseases especially hard.

Empowering Smart Aging: Insights into the Technical Architecture of the e-VITA Virtual Coaching System for Older Adults.

With a substantial rise in life expectancy throughout the last century, society faces the imperative of seeking inventive approaches to foster active aging and provide adequate aging care. The e-VITA initiative, jointly funded by the European Union and Japan, centers on an advanced virtual coaching methodology designed to target essential aspects of promoting active and healthy aging. This paper describes the technical framework underlying the e-VITA virtual coaching system platform and presents preliminary feedback on its use.

Interaction with a Virtual Coach for Active and Healthy Ageing.

Since life expectancy has increased significantly over the past century, society is being forced to discover innovative ways to support active aging and elderly care. The e-VITA project, which receives funding from both the European Union and Japan, is built on a cutting edge method of virtual coaching that focuses on the key areas of active and healthy aging. The requirements for the virtual coach were ascertained through a process of participatory design in workshops, focus groups, and living laboratories in Germany, France, Italy, and Japan.

Predicting CYP2D6 phenotype from resting brain perfusion images by gradient boosting.

The cytochrome P450 enzyme 2D6 is involved in the metabolism of 20% of all commonly used drugs, including many psychotropic drugs and CNS-active substances. CYP2D6 is among the CYP enzymes with the highest expression levels in the brain, suggesting a role in the local brain metabolism of psychotropic drugs and the existence of endogenous substrates. The genetic polymorphism of CYP2D6, which causes individual differences in activity levels of the enzyme, has also been characterized functionally in human brain imaging studies.

Machine learning classification of surgical pathology reports and chunk recognition for information extraction noise reduction.

Background And Aims: Machine learning techniques for the text mining of cancer-related clinical documents have not been sufficiently explored. Here some techniques are presented for the pre-processing of free-text breast cancer pathology reports, with the aim of facilitating the extraction of information relevant to cancer staging.

Materials And Methods: The first technique was implemented using the freely available software RapidMiner to classify the reports according to their general layout: 'semi-structured' and 'unstructured'.

Prognostic value of added stratification of circumferential resection margin status in oesophageal carcinoma.

Aims: Involved circumferential resection margin (CRM) (R1) in oesophageal carcinoma (OC) has conflicting definitions. This study aimed to compare two such definitions applied to a cohort of OC resection specimens and also evaluated a novel three-tier CRM stratification.

Methods And Results: OC patients with pT3 disease were classified as R0 or R1 on the basis of Royal College of Pathologists (UK) (RCPath) and College of American Pathologists (CAP) criteria and group survivals were compared.

Pattern-based information extraction from pathology reports for cancer registration.

Objective: To evaluate precision and recall rates for the automatic extraction of information from free-text pathology reports. To assess the impact that implementation of pattern-based methods would have on cancer registration completeness.

Method: Over 300,000 electronic pathology reports were scanned for the extraction of Gleason score, Clark level and Breslow depth, by a number of Perl routines progressively enhanced by a trial-and-error method.

Methods of calculating prostate-specific antigen velocity.

Objectives: Numerous methods of calculating PSA velocity (PSAV) are used and have the potential to produce differing PSAV results from the same PSA data. We calculated PSAV using three common methods and compared differences between the methods and their predictive value for prostate cancer diagnosis.

Methods: From a population-based database of PSA results, men with initial PSA<10.

Electronic patient data confidentiality practices among surgical trainees: questionnaire study.

Introduction: The objective of this work was to evaluate the safeguards implemented by surgical trainees to protect the confidentiality of electronic patient data through a structured questionnaire sent to Northern Ireland surgical trainees.

Participants And Methods: A group of 32 basic and higher surgical trainees attending a meeting of the Northern Ireland Association of Surgeons-in-Training were invited to complete a questionnaire regarding their computer use, UK Data Protection Act, 1988 registration and electronic data confidentiality practices.

Results: Of these 32 trainees, 29 returned completed questionnaires of whom 26 trainees regularly stored sensitive patient data for audit or research purposes on a computer.