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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
🗞️ 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.
About Champalimaud: A top research institute
Champalimaud Foundation, a private biomedical research institute based in Lisbon, Portugal, has established itself as a prominent player in artificial intelligence (AI) research, particularly in the fields of neuroscience and cancer research. In 2010, the Champalimaud Foundation inaugurated the Champalimaud Centre for the Unknown, a hub for multidisciplinary and translational research in biomedicine, which contributed to placing Portugal at the forefront of world science.
The foundation integrates research and clinical operations to develop cutting-edge science alongside excellent patient care and is actively developing and adapting supervised and unsupervised machine learning and AI techniques to extract relevant data in various research contexts. It has earned significant recognition for its data-driven brain and cancer research and ranks No. 11 globally among nonprofits and NGO’s in the Nature Index 2024.
Not Your Typical Metaverse
Champalimaud is leading the way in applying AI and machine learning techniques to cancer imaging. One of the foundation's most exciting developments is the use of augmented reality (AR) technology in breast cancer surgery.
🎉 In November 2020, surgeon Pedro Gouveia and his team at the Champalimaud Clinical Center performed a groundbreaking procedure using an AR headset to enhance tumor visibility during surgery. This visibility assists in preventing excessive treatment and the collateral damage issues we mentioned earlier. Imagine the countless individuals that can be spared from surgeries or chemotherapy. It’s quite a big deal if you think about it like that.
💫 In May 2022, surgeons Rogelio Andrés-Luna and Pedro Gouveia performed the first live experiment in the world, during breast cancer surgery, using what they call ‘remote proctoring’, a novel form of remote surgical supervision utilizing Microsoft’s Hololens mixed-reality goggles, relying on 5G networks to ensure the low latency required for real-time communication and visualization across international borders.
One of their most recent research projects integrates augmented reality, virtual reality, and artificial intelligence to visualize tumors in real-time during breast cancer surgery.
Dr. Pedro Gouveia at Champalimaud using mixed-reality goggles for surgery
Dr. Pedro Gouveia at the Champalimaud Foundation
The project will utilize a new "Medical Metaverse Room" within Champalimaud's Digital Surgery LAB to create a database of "pseudo-anonymised" patient data. Pseudonymisation is a data protection technique that replaces identifying information in a dataset with artificial identifiers, or pseudonyms. This database includes annotated images, 3D torso models, and other relevant attributes, which will be used to generate over 10,000 "digital" patients.
The technology aims to superimpose medical images onto a precise representation of the patient's body during surgery, potentially allowing for complete tumor extraction in a single procedure. For context, recent studies have reported that re-operation occurs up to 21.1% of the time.
Technology for Behavioral Change
”The most powerful technology we have to create beautiful, engaging, immersive, motivating experiences that would make for effective behavioural change have been left to video game makers and social media. It’s time to make better use of those approaches by creating an institute built around the core mission of becoming the world leader in Digital Therapeutics: Prescribable behavioural interventions through technology.”
The foundation is actively working to bridge the gap between AI innovation and its implementation in medical practice. They organize conferences and events to facilitate dialogue between doctors and technologists about artificial intelligence in healthcare.
The next opportunity to join the conversation happens on October 19: Join the Bridge AI Conference if you happen to be in Lisbon.
Until next time.
On behalf of Team Lumiera
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