A woman with late-stage breast cancer came to a city hospital, fluids already flooding her lungs. She saw two doctors and got a radiology scan. The hospital’s computers read her vital signs and estimated a 9.3 percent chance she would die during her stay.
Then came Google’s turn. A new type of algorithm created by the company read up on the woman — 175,639 data points — and rendered its assessment of her death risk: 19.9 percent. She passed away in a matter of days.
The harrowing account of the unidentified woman’s death was published by Google last month in research highlighting the healthcare potential of neural networks, a form of artificial intelligence (AI) software that is particularly good at using data to automatically learn and improve.
Illustration: Mountain people
Google had created a tool that could forecast a host of patient outcomes, including how long people might stay in hospitals, their odds of readmission and chances they would soon die.
What impressed medical experts most was Google’s ability to sift through data previously out of reach: notes buried in PDFs or scribbled on old charts. The neural net gobbled up all this unruly information then spat out predictions — and it did it far faster and more accurately than existing techniques.
Google’s system even showed which records led it to conclusions.
Hospitals, doctors and other healthcare providers have been trying for years to better use stockpiles of electronic health records and other patient data. More information shared and highlighted at the right time could save lives — and at the very least help medical workers spend less time on paperwork and more time on patient care.
However, current methods of mining health data are costly, cumbersome and time-consuming.
As much as 80 percent of the time spent on today’s predictive models goes to the “scut work” of making the data presentable, said Nigam Shah, an associate professor at Stanford University who coauthored Google’s research paper, published in the journal Nature.
Google’s approach avoids this.
“You can throw in the kitchen sink and not have to worry about it,” Shah said.
Google’s next step is moving this predictive system into clinics, AI chief Jeff Dean told Bloomberg News last month.
Dean’s health research unit — sometimes referred to as Medical Brain — is working on a slew of AI tools that can predict symptoms and disease with a level of accuracy that is being met with hope as well as alarm.
Inside the company, there is a lot of excitement about the initiative.
“They’ve finally found a new application for AI that has commercial promise,” one Google employee said.
Since Alphabet Inc’s Google declared itself an “AI-first” company in 2016, much of its work in this area has gone to improve existing Internet services. The advances coming from the Medical Brain team give Google the chance to break into a new market — something cofounders Larry Page and Sergey Brin have tried over and over again.
Software in healthcare is largely coded by hand these days.
In contrast, Google’s approach, where machines learn to parse data on their own, “can just leapfrog everything else,” said Vik Bajaj, a former executive at Verily, an Alphabet healthcare arm, and managing director of investment firm Foresite Capital.
“They understand what problems are worth solving,” he said. “They’ve now done enough small experiments to know exactly what the fruitful directions are.”
Dean envisions the AI system steering doctors toward certain medications and diagnoses.
Another Google researcher said existing models miss obvious medical events, including whether a patient had prior surgery.
Existing hand-coded models are “an obvious, gigantic roadblock” in healthcare, the person said, asking not to be identified as they were discussing work in progress.
For all the optimism over Google’s potential, harnessing AI to improve healthcare outcomes remains a huge challenge.
Other companies, notably IBM’s Watson unit, have tried to apply AI to medicine, but have had limited success saving money and integrating the technology into reimbursement systems.
Google has long sought access to digital medical records, also with mixed results. For its recent research, the Internet giant cut deals with the University of California, San Francisco, and the University of Chicago for 46 billion pieces of anonymous patient data. Google’s AI system created predictive models for each hospital, not one that parses data across the two, a harder problem.
A solution for all hospitals would be even more challenging. Google is working to secure new partners for access to more records.
A deeper dive into health would only add to the vast amounts of information Google already has on us.
“Companies like Google and other tech giants are going to have a unique, almost monopolistic, ability to capitalize on all the data we generate,” said Andrew Burt, chief privacy officer for data company Immuta.
He and pediatric oncologist Samuel Volchenboum wrote a recent column arguing governments should prevent this data from becoming “the province of only a few companies,” such as in online advertising where Google reigns.
Google is treading carefully when it comes to patient information, particularly as public scrutiny over data collection rises.
Last year, British regulators slapped DeepMind, another Alphabet AI lab, for testing an app that analyzed public medical records without telling patients that their information would be used like this.
With the latest study, Google and its hospital partners insist their data is anonymous, secure and used with patient permission.
Volchenboum said the company might have a more difficult time maintaining that data rigor if it expands to smaller hospitals and healthcare networks.
Still, Volchenboum believes these algorithms could save lives and money. He hopes health records will be mixed with a sea of other stats.
Eventually, AI models could include information on local weather and traffic — other factors that influence patient outcomes.
“It’s almost like the hospital is an organism,” he said.
Few companies are better poised to analyze this organism than Google. The company and its Alphabet cousin, Verily, are developing devices to track far more biological signals.
Even if consumers do not take up wearable health trackers en masse, Google has plenty of other data wells to tap. It knows the weather and traffic. Google’s Android phones track things such as how people walk, valuable information for measuring mental decline and some other ailments. All that could be thrown into the medical algorithmic soup.
Medical records are just part of Google’s AI healthcare plans. Its Medical Brain has unfurled AI systems for radiology, ophthalmology and cardiology. It is flirting with dermatology, too. Staff created an app for spotting malignant skin lesions; a product manager walks around the office with 15 fake tattoos on her arms to test it.
Dean said this experimentation relies on serious medical counsel, not just curious software coders.
Google is starting a new trial in India that uses its AI software to screen images of eyes for early signs of a condition called diabetic retinopathy.
Before releasing it, Google had three retinal specialists furiously debate the early research results, Dean said.
Over time, Google could license these systems to clinics, or sell them through the company’s cloud-computing division as a sort of diagnostics-as-a-service.
Microsoft Corp, a top cloud rival, is also working on predictive AI services.
To commercialize an offering, Google would first need to get its hands on more records, which tend to vary widely across health providers. Google could buy them, but that might not sit well with regulators or consumers.
The deals with University of California, San Francisco, and the University of Chicago are not commercial.
For now, the company says it is too early to settle on a business model.
At Google’s annual developer conference last month, Lily Peng, a member of Medical Brain, walked through the team’s research outmatching humans in spotting heart disease risk.
“Again,” she said. “I want to emphasize that this is really early on.”
Could Asia be on the verge of a new wave of nuclear proliferation? A look back at the early history of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), which recently celebrated its 75th anniversary, illuminates some reasons for concern in the Indo-Pacific today. US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin recently described NATO as “the most powerful and successful alliance in history,” but the organization’s early years were not without challenges. At its inception, the signing of the North Atlantic Treaty marked a sea change in American strategic thinking. The United States had been intent on withdrawing from Europe in the years following
My wife and I spent the week in the interior of Taiwan where Shuyuan spent her childhood. In that town there is a street that functions as an open farmer’s market. Walk along that street, as Shuyuan did yesterday, and it is next to impossible to come home empty-handed. Some mangoes that looked vaguely like others we had seen around here ended up on our table. Shuyuan told how she had bought them from a little old farmer woman from the countryside who said the mangoes were from a very old tree she had on her property. The big surprise
The issue of China’s overcapacity has drawn greater global attention recently, with US Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen urging Beijing to address its excess production in key industries during her visit to China last week. Meanwhile in Brussels, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen last week said that Europe must have a tough talk with China on its perceived overcapacity and unfair trade practices. The remarks by Yellen and Von der Leyen come as China’s economy is undergoing a painful transition. Beijing is trying to steer the world’s second-largest economy out of a COVID-19 slump, the property crisis and
Former president Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) trip to China provides a pertinent reminder of why Taiwanese protested so vociferously against attempts to force through the cross-strait service trade agreement in 2014 and why, since Ma’s presidential election win in 2012, they have not voted in another Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) candidate. While the nation narrowly avoided tragedy — the treaty would have put Taiwan on the path toward the demobilization of its democracy, which Courtney Donovan Smith wrote about in the Taipei Times in “With the Sunflower movement Taiwan dodged a bullet” — Ma’s political swansong in China, which included fawning dithyrambs