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General General

Big data, machine learning and artificial intelligence: a neurologist's guide.

In Practical neurology

Modern clinical practice requires the integration and interpretation of ever-expanding volumes of clinical data. There is, therefore, an imperative to develop efficient ways to process and understand these large amounts of data. Neurologists work to understand the function of biological neural networks, but artificial neural networks and other forms of machine learning algorithm are likely to be increasingly encountered in clinical practice. As their use increases, clinicians will need to understand the basic principles and common types of algorithm. We aim to provide a coherent introduction to this jargon-heavy subject and equip neurologists with the tools to understand, critically appraise and apply insights from this burgeoning field.

Auger Stephen D, Jacobs Benjamin M, Dobson Ruth, Marshall Charles R, Noyce Alastair J

2020-Sep-29

Neuroradiology, clinical neurology, evidence-based neurology, health policy & practice, image analysis

Surgery Surgery

The Gut Microbiome and Individual-Specific Responses to Diet.

In mSystems

Nutritional content and timing are increasingly appreciated to constitute important human variables collectively impacting all aspects of human physiology and disease. However, person-specific mechanisms driving nutritional impacts on the human host remain incompletely understood, while current dietary recommendations remain empirical and nonpersonalized. Precision nutrition aims to harness individualized bodies of data, including the human gut microbiome, in predicting person-specific physiological responses (such as glycemic responses) to food. With these advances notwithstanding, many unknowns remain, including the long-term efficacy of such interventions in delaying or reversing human metabolic disease, mechanisms driving these dietary effects, and the extent of the contribution of the gut microbiome to these processes. We summarize these conceptual advances, while highlighting challenges and means of addressing them in the next decade of study of precision medicine, toward generation of insights that may help to evolve precision nutrition as an effective future tool in a variety of "multifactorial" human disorders.

Leshem Avner, Segal Eran, Elinav Eran

2020-Sep-29

machine learning, microbiome, personalized nutrition

General General

The Emerging Role of Artificial Intelligence in the Fight Against COVID-19.

In European urology ; h5-index 128.0

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has generated large volumes of clinical data that can be an invaluable resource towards answering a number of important questions for this and future pandemics. Artificial intelligence can have an important role in analysing such data to identify populations at higher risk of COVID-19-related urological pathologies and to suggest treatments that block viral entry into cells by interrupting the angiotensin-converting enzyme 2-transmembrane serine protease 2 (ACE2-TMPRSS2) pathway.

Ghose Aruni, Roy Sabyasachi, Vasdev Nikhil, Olsburgh Jonathon, Dasgupta Prokar

2020-Sep-17

General General

Methodologically grounded semantic analysis of large volume of chilean medical literature data applied to the analysis of medical research funding efficiency in Chile.

In Journal of biomedical semantics ; h5-index 23.0

BACKGROUND : Medical knowledge is accumulated in scientific research papers along time. In order to exploit this knowledge by automated systems, there is a growing interest in developing text mining methodologies to extract, structure, and analyze in the shortest time possible the knowledge encoded in the large volume of medical literature. In this paper, we use the Latent Dirichlet Allocation approach to analyze the correlation between funding efforts and actually published research results in order to provide the policy makers with a systematic and rigorous tool to assess the efficiency of funding programs in the medical area.

RESULTS : We have tested our methodology in the Revista Médica de Chile, years 2012-2015. 50 relevant semantic topics were identified within 643 medical scientific research papers. Relationships between the identified semantic topics were uncovered using visualization methods. We have also been able to analyze the funding patterns of scientific research underlying these publications. We found that only 29% of the publications declare funding sources, and we identified five topic clusters that concentrate 86% of the declared funds.

CONCLUSIONS : Our methodology allows analyzing and interpreting the current state of medical research at a national level. The funding source analysis may be useful at the policy making level in order to assess the impact of actual funding policies, and to design new policies.

Wolff Patricio, Ríos Sebastián, Clavijo David, Graña Manuel, Carrasco Miguel

2020-Sep-29

Data science, Healthcare management, Latent Dirichlet allocation, Machine learning, Strategy

oncology Oncology

Predicting complete cytoreduction for advanced ovarian cancer patients using nearest-neighbor models.

In Journal of ovarian research

BACKGROUND : The foundation of modern ovarian cancer care is cytoreductive surgery to remove all macroscopic disease (R0). Identification of R0 resection patients may help individualise treatment. Machine learning and AI have been shown to be effective systems for classification and prediction. For a disease as heterogenous as ovarian cancer, they could potentially outperform conventional predictive algorithms for routine clinical use. We investigated the performance of an AI system, the k-nearest neighbor (k-NN) classifier, to predict R0, comparing it with logistic regression. Patients diagnosed with advanced stage, high grade serous ovarian, tubal and primary peritoneal cancer, undergoing surgical cytoreduction from 2015 to 2019, was selected from the ovarian database. Performance variables included age, BMI, Charlson Comorbidity Index, timing of surgery, surgical complexity and disease score. The k-NN algorithm classified R0 vs non-R0 patients using 3-20 nearest neighbors. Prediction accuracy was estimated as percentage of observations in the training set correctly classified.

RESULTS : 154 patients were identified, with mean age of 64.4 + 10.5 yrs., BMI of 27.2 + 5.8 and mean SCS of 3 + 1 (1-8). Complete and optimal cytoreduction was achieved in 62 and 88% patients. The mean predictive accuracy was 66%. R0 resection prediction of true negatives was as high as 90% using k = 20 neighbors.

CONCLUSIONS : The k-NN algorithm is a promising and versatile tool for R0 resection prediction. It slightly outperforms logistic regression and is expected to improve accuracy with data expansion.

Laios Alexandros, Gryparis Alexandros, DeJong Diederick, Hutson Richard, Theophilou Georgios, Leach Chris

2020-Sep-29

Artificial intelligence, Cytoreduction, Machine learning, Ovarian Cancer, Predictive factors

General General

Predicting clinically significant motor function improvement after contemporary task-oriented interventions using machine learning approaches.

In Journal of neuroengineering and rehabilitation ; h5-index 53.0

BACKGROUND : Accurate prediction of motor recovery after stroke is critical for treatment decisions and planning. Machine learning has been proposed to be a promising technique for outcome prediction because of its high accuracy and ability to process large volumes of data. It has been used to predict acute stroke recovery; however, whether machine learning would be effective for predicting rehabilitation outcomes in chronic stroke patients for common contemporary task-oriented interventions remains largely unexplored. This study aimed to determine the accuracy and performance of machine learning to predict clinically significant motor function improvements after contemporary task-oriented intervention in chronic stroke patients and identify important predictors for building machine learning prediction models.

METHODS : This study was a secondary analysis of data using two common machine learning approaches, which were the k-nearest neighbor (KNN) and artificial neural network (ANN). Chronic stroke patients (N = 239) that received 30 h of task-oriented training including the constraint-induced movement therapy, bilateral arm training, robot-assisted therapy and mirror therapy were included. The Fugl-Meyer assessment scale (FMA) was the main outcome. Potential predictors include age, gender, side of lesion, time since stroke, baseline functional status, motor function and quality of life. We divided the data set into a training set and a test set and used the cross-validation procedure to construct machine learning models based on the training set. After the models were built, we used the test data set to evaluate the accuracy and prediction performance of the models.

RESULTS : Three important predictors were identified, which were time since stroke, baseline functional independence measure (FIM) and baseline FMA scores. Models for predicting motor function improvements were accurate. The prediction accuracy of the KNN model was 85.42% and area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC-ROC) was 0.89. The prediction accuracy of the ANN model was 81.25% and the AUC-ROC was 0.77.

CONCLUSIONS : Incorporating machine learning into clinical outcome prediction using three key predictors including time since stroke, baseline functional and motor ability may help clinicians/therapists to identify patients that are most likely to benefit from contemporary task-oriented interventions. The KNN and ANN models may be potentially useful for predicting clinically significant motor recovery in chronic stroke.

Thakkar Hiren Kumar, Liao Wan-Wen, Wu Ching-Yi, Hsieh Yu-Wei, Lee Tsong-Hai

2020-Sep-29

Machine learning, Motor function, Prognosis, Rehabilitation, Stroke