Listen and read 15: Iscanning - Thấm Tâm Vy

Nội dung text: Listen and read 15: Iscanning - Thấm Tâm Vy

1. The Moorfields data set has a lot of linked cases to work with—far more than any similar LISTEN AND READ 15 project. For instance, the UK Biobank, one of the world’s leading collections of medical Medical diagnosis data about individual people, contains 631 cases of a “major cardiac adverse event”. The ISCANNING Moorfields data contain about 12,000 such. The Biobank has data on about 1,500 stroke A system based on ai will search the patients. Moorfields has 11,900. For the disease on which the Moorfields project will focus retina for early signs of disease to start with, dementia, the data set holds 15,100 cases. The only comparable study had 86. THE DIFFERENT parts of a health-care system have different focuses. A hospital’s Drs Wagner and Keane are searching for patterns in the eye that betray the emergence of dementia unit keeps records of patients’ mental abilities. The stroke unit monitors blood disease elsewhere in the body, and are focusing first, as the name AlzEye suggests, on flow in the brain. The cardiac unit is interested in that same flow, but through and from the Alzheimer’s disease. They will seek such patterns with the help of machine-learning heart. Each agglomeration of equipment and data is effective in its own domain, but for the algorithms that can crunch through imagery far faster than any human being, and which can most part has little relevance to other bits of the body and the conditions that plague them. spot far tinier variations. (The team has collaborated with DeepMind, a British artificial- Thus, like the proverbial blind men feeling an elephant, modern health care offers many intelligence firm co-founded by Mustafa Suleyman, who sits on The Economist’s board.) fragmented pictures of a patient, but rarely a useful cohesive one. They may, it should be remembered, never find such patterns. Although there is On top of all this, the instruments that doctors use to monitor health are often expensive, as circumstantial evidence that the back of the eye does change as its owner develops is the training required to wield them. That combined cost is too high for the medical system Alzheimer’s, it may be that the changes are too subtle to be detected reliably enough for to scan regularly, for early signs of illness, all patients at risk of dementia, heart disease or a diagnosis. If such patterns could be recognised reliably, though, the potential impact would stroke. Rather, doctors work to manage symptoms after a disease has obviously taken hold. be huge. Even in rich countries, between 50% and 80% of Alzheimer’s cases go An unusual research project called AlzEye, run from Moorfields Eye Hospital in London, undiagnosed. Moreover, even if the technique does not work for Alzheimer’s, it might work in collaboration with University College, for something else. Dr Wagner and Dr Keane therefore plan further searches for patterns London (UCL), may change this. It is related to strokes and heart disease. Even one relevant pattern would constitute a attempting to use the eye as a window through remarkable diagnostic leap forward. which to detect signals about the health of other Seeing is believing organs. The doctors in charge of it, Siegfried If it does work, the technique the two researchers are proposing will be cheap to Wagner and Pearse Keane, are linking implement. An indication of how cheap is the project’s total budget of just £15,000 (about Moorfields’ database of eye scans, which offer $19,000). Equipment to perform an eye scan is becoming ubiquitous. Specsavers, which a detailed picture of the health of the retina, runs a chain of high-street opticians, now routinely offers the same sort of scans as with information about other aspects of its Moorfields’ in half of its 800 branches. Costco, a bulk retailer, offers scans in Britain for patients’ health garnered from other hospitals £24.99 a pop. An Israeli company called Notal Vision is building an eye-scanning device around England. This will allow them to look that is small enough to operate at home. The equipment and algorithms required to run for telltales of disease in the eye scans. machine learning on an eye scan are available to anyone, through cloud-computing services The data set includes, whether they know it or like Google and Amazon. Dr Keane once joked that he would like to see eye-scanning not, every one of the 300,000 patients who widgets become so cheap that they could be bundled in boxes of cereal. visited Moorfields between 2008 and 2018 and This project will also act as a model for linking disparate health data together in a useful was over the age of 40—though names and other easily identifiable information are not way while respecting patients’ rights. Other such endeavours involving information- preserved. The idea is to examine changes to people’s eyes within that ten-year period, and technology firms handling health data, such as Google’s work with Ascension hospitals in correlate these with, say, the emergence of Alzheimer’s disease in the same patient. America, or other parts of its subsidiary DeepMind’s work with England’s health service, Building such a data set while respecting privacy and confidentiality has been a challenge. It have generated controversy because they offered no notice of their plans to patients. As well took the doctors two and a half years to go through a series of ethics-committee approvals at as jumping deftly through all the required legal and ethical hoops, Drs Wagner and Keane Moorfields, UCL and NHS Digital, the body which handles agglomerated data from English also posted notices around the hospital and on Moorfields’ website, informing patients of hospitals. In order to create the database without the consent of the patients involved they the impending linkage. Besides explaining what was happening, these also noted the invoked a special legal provision known as Section 251 assent, which comes with its own research’s potential benefits. Not one person complained. [The Economist US, Dec 21, 2019] review process and, in essence, empowers senior government health officials to give consent Notes: on behalf of patients from whom it would be impractical or impossible to acquire such st - dementia: chứng tâm thần phân liệt - agglomeration: sự tích tụ individually. The data sets were linked together on November 1 [2019], and the process of - to garner: thu vào; gom nhặt - to crunch [jargon] = to compress into smallest quantity correlation is now under way. - a pop [< Latin] = per person Thẩm Tâm Vy, Dec 31, 2019 LISTEN AND READ 15