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- 🔆 Welcome to the Medical Metaverse: How AI advances the treatment of breast cancer
🔆 Welcome to the Medical Metaverse: How AI advances the treatment of breast cancer
Portuguese institute revolutionizes breast cancer surgery, TikTok automates moderation, and an AI tongue takes the Coke v. Pepsi taste test
Allegra Guinan & Emma G Moller
October 17, 2024
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🗞️ Issue 40 // ⏱️ Read Time: 5 min
Hello 👋
In this week's newsletter
What we’re talking about: The health research gap in breast cancer treatment and how AI innovations at the Champalimaud Foundation are addressing this issue.
How it’s relevant: Despite medical advancements, breast cancer treatment often follows a one-size-fits-all approach, leading to overtreatment and unnecessary procedures. The Champalimaud Foundation's research represents a pivotal shift in cancer treatment, demonstrating how AI and AR can personalize treatment and potentially reduce the consequences of excessive interventions.
Why it matters: By addressing the overtreatment issue, technological innovation could spare countless women from unnecessary procedures and their associated physical and emotional toll. Targeted AI applications like these can solve critical healthcare challenges, potentially transforming patient care across various medical fields and inspiring similar advancements in other areas of health research.
Big tech news of the week…
🤖 TikTok, the popular video-sharing platform owned by ByteDance, is making a significant shift in its content moderation strategy by laying off hundreds of human moderators and increasing its reliance on AI for content review. There are still questions about the accuracy of these algorithms, and unfortunately, there are no third-party assessments of the content moderation systems these platforms implement.
👅 Researchers have developed an innovative electronic "tongue" that uses artificial intelligence to distinguish between similar liquids like Pepsi and Coca-Cola with remarkable accuracy. Beyond taste testing, the technology shows promise for detecting contaminants in food and monitoring product quality, potentially revolutionizing food safety and quality control processes.
🌏 Youtube is taking a (small) step towards labeling authentic video by using CP2A standards. It supports creators and users to verify the video’s origin and confirm its audio and visuals haven’t been altered.
The Health Research Gap
Like other scientific fields, medicine has made significant progress in recent years. However, its advancement is uneven, with some areas prioritized over others due to biased funding and outdated methods and systems.
One area where this is apparent is in the treatment of breast cancer. Recent developments have brought to light a complex reality: Many women with breast cancer are receiving excessive treatment. This realization comes from advancements in genomic testing and a deeper understanding of breast cancer biology.
The traditional one-size-fits-all approach is proving inadequate (wow, who would have thought 🙃) as medical professionals recognize that each woman presents a unique biological risk profile and individual risk tolerance. While some cases demand aggressive intervention, many others could benefit from a more measured approach. Despite improvements in breast cancer detection, emerging data suggests there might be more effective ways to treat certain breast cancers, especially in the early stages. Growing evidence shows that aggressive treatments, originally designed to save lives, can sometimes lead to unforeseen and potentially devastating consequences.
This "collateral damage" can include multiple surgeries, infections, unnecessary radiation or chemotherapy, and associated side effects, such as depression. For an increasing number of medical professionals, justifying this collateral damage is becoming increasingly difficult, leading to calls for a significant shift in breast cancer treatment approaches.
This evolving understanding highlights the importance of personalized medicine and the need for ongoing research and adaptation of medical practices in breast cancer treatment. Let’s look at how one research center is doing just that.