Cancer Survivor Develops AI For Medical Advancements

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MIT professor Regina Barzilay’s breast cancer scare has shifted her focus to applying artificial intelligence to improve medical treatment and diagnosis

>(VERO BEACH, FL) Professor Barzilay teaches a popular course on machine learning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Boston, and is known for her work on natural language processing, or rather, teaching computers to understand human speech.

>In 2014 Professor Barzliay’s work was interrupted by an unexpected breast cancer diagnosis, which showed her both a major technological shortfall in the medical sector and a way to apply her skill set to improve the way the aliment is treated.

>"Going through it, I realized that today we have more sophisticated technology to select your shoes on Amazon than to adjust treatments for cancer patients," Professor Barzilay told CNBC in an interview at her office in Cambridge. "I really wanted to make sure that the expertise we have would be used for helping people."

>"Looking back, there was clearly no tumor on the previous mammograms, but was there something in these very complex images that would hint at... a wrong development?" Barzilay said. "It clearly didn't just appear. Biological processes are in place to make a successful growth and it clearly impacts the tissue. So for a human who looks at it, it's very hard to quantify the change, but a machine may look at millions of these images. This should really help them to look at these signs."

>Professor Barzliay has since founded a group to apply AI to the cancer treatment field in a collaboration with Massachusetts General Hospital.

>"The potential is perhaps the biggest in any type of technology we've ever had in the field of medicine," the director of the Scripps Translational Science Institute Dr. Eric Topol told CNBC. "Computing capability can transcend what a human being could ever do in their lifetime."