Personalized medicine

Since researchers successfully generated the first sequence of the human genome — or human DNA — the global wealth of biological data has grown. Not only have scientists increased their knowledge about human DNA and traced back our species' lineage, but they have also started amassing unprecedented amounts of personal medical data.

This explosion of personal medical data has led to a desire for a personalized form of medicine, rather than our current "one-size-fits-all" approach. It's the idea that we can use an individual's own healthcare profile (such as their genetic make-up and possible gene mutations) to make better informed decisions about the prevention, diagnosis, and treatment of a disease and their individual symptoms. That requires big data and a lot of computing power and the ability to sift through, analyze and detect patterns in more data than humans could manage to do in real-time.

And this is where artificial intelligence comes in. It's been shown, for instance, that an AI can spot tumors that human doctors may overlook or misinterpret. But it's more than that: It's because scientists can use AI to analyze and compare larger sets of data that we have finer detail about the health risks that people face, and which treatments are most likely to work. Experts are already using AI to develop personalized treatments, for example to scan women’s genomes to look for mutations in the BRCA gene which are linked with high rates of breast cancer. (za/fs)

  

Coming soon:

Predictive AI
Probabilistic reasoning

Sources:

Artificial intelligence and personalized medicine (National Library of Medicine, Nicholas J. Schork) https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7580505/ (accessed October 18, 2023)

Personalized medicine (National Human Genome Research Institute) https://www.genome.gov/genetics-glossary/Personalized-Medicine (accessed October 18, 2023)

The human genome project (National Human Genome Research Institute) https://www.genome.gov/human-genome-project (accessed October 18, 2023)

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Written and edited by: Zulfikar Abbany (za), Fred Schwaller (fs)