Events

February 22, 2021 at 4:00PM - 5:30PM

There is an urgent need to take what we have learned in our new data-driven era of medicine, and use it to create a new system of precision medicine, delivering the best, safest, cost-effective preventative or therapeutic intervention at the right time, for the right patients.  Dr. Butte's lab at the University of California, San Francisco builds and applies tools that convert trillions of points of molecular, clinical, and epidemiological data -- measured by researchers and clinicians over the past decade and now commonly termed “big data” -- into diagnostics, therapeutics, and new insights into disease.  Dr. Butte, a computer scientist and pediatrician, will highlight his center’s recent work on integrating electronic health records data across the entire University of California, and how analytics on this “real world data” can lead to new evidence for drug efficacy, new savings from better medication choices, and new methods to teach intelligence – real and artificial – to more precisely practice medicine. 

January 29, 2021 at 09:30AM - 10:30AM

We are often wowed by the *potential* of AI (and frankly other sophisticated computational approaches) to transform research and clinical workflows. New approaches seem to magically hold unbounded promise. Yet, there is often a large gulf between theory and practice, between a shiny new technique and having anyone just use it. The questions of "How do I get this ? How do I get my data from PACS to connect to this? How do I go from DICOM to something that the neural network wants? How do I get results that are useful?" In this talk I will provide some insights into practically developing, using, and disseminating "AI" (and other) workflows in the BCH clinical and research environment.

January 11, 2021 at 4:00PM - 5:30PM

Genome sequencing is revolutionizing the diagnosis of rare diseases, but 95% of these conditions still lack effective therapy. With up to 7,000 distinct genetic diseases to tackle, new and creative frameworks will be necessary to meet this need. Recent advances offer the prospect of platform-based therapeutic approaches to certain genetically targetable disorders — in the right circumstances, facilitating the design and deployment of hyper-personalized drugs for conditions affecting as few as even a single patient. The scientific, clinical, ethical, and regulatory implications of these capabilities will be discussed.

December 8, 2020 at 4:45PM - 5:30PM

Dr. Savova led a discussion of tasks and applications of clinical Natural Language Processing (NLP) in medicine, such as: The landscape of neural approaches and clinical NLP (Wu et al, 2019; https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31794016/) Data challenges in clinical NLP (de-identified data, usability and challenges) Some tasks and applications Information extraction for cancer surveillance (DeepPhe-CR) (Savova et al, 2017; https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29092954/) Treatment information extraction (Bitterman et al, 2020 https://www.aclweb.org/anthology/2020.clinicalnlp-1.21.pdf; Lin et al, 2020 https://www.aclweb.org/anthology/2020.louhi-1.12.pdf) What is trending.

November 10, 2020 at 4:45PM - 5:30PM

Dr. Rasooly led a discussion of the following paper about Google/DeepMind's AI system for breast cancer screening: McKinney et al. International evaluation of an AI system for breast cancer screening. Nature2020. as well as the following paper AI transparency/reproducibility: Haibe-Kains et al. Transparency and reproducibility in artificial intelligence. Nature 2020. ​The two papers are accessible as pdfs here.

November 9, 2020 at 4:00PM - 5:30PM

What can medicine learn about collaboration and data sharing from one of the most successful team science projects of all time--creating a telescope the diameter of the earth to snap an image of a black hole? Black holes are cosmic objects so massive and dense that their gravity forms an event horizon: a region of spacetime from which nothing, not even light, can escape. Einstein's theories predict that a distant observer should see a ring of light encircling the black hole, which forms when radiation emitted by infalling hot gas is lensed by the extreme gravity. The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) is a global array of radio dishes that forms an Earth-sized virtual telescope, which can resolve the nearest supermassive black holes where this ring feature may be measured. On April 10th, 2019, the EHT project reported success: we have imaged a black hole and have seen the predicted strong gravitational lensing that confirms the theory of General Relativity at the boundary of a black hole.  This talk will describe the project, and the global collaborative approach that produced these first results, as well as future directions that will enable real-time black hole movies.

October 16, 2020 at 09:30AM - 10:30AM

Dr. Ben Reis discussed recent developments in machine learning approaches to some of the grandest challenges of human health, including pandemic prediction, suicide prevention, bioterrorism detection, and drug safety prediction. The focus was on understanding both the methodological challenges involved and the ramifications of generating actionable predictions in these critical areas. The talk concluded by formulating a set of central challenges and opportunities facing the field of Predictive Medicine.

September 9, 2020 at 09:30AM - 10:30AM

The BCH AI and Machine Learning Working Group held our first Lightning Talks session, where multiple investigators gave brief overviews of numerous Machine Learning applications at Boston Children’s Hospital to foster clinical and machine learning collaborations across the hospital.

August 14, 2020 at 09:30AM - 10:30AM

Boston Children’s Hospital data warehouse integrates 15 years of extensive clinical and administrative data sources and more years of selected data sources. While the contents are used extensively for daily operational reporting, the potential for extensive retrospective and predictive analytics is largely untapped. Jonathan Bickel, Ashley Doherty, and Ron Wilkinson will show something of the breadth of data available in the EDW, discuss how predictive modeling tools can access the data, discuss ideas for predictive modeling applications that they think would be valuable, and explain the conditions on which access to the data can be granted.

July 17, 2020 at 09:30AM - 10:30AM

Dr. Yangming Ou briefly reviewed some major concepts and milestones of AI in medical images. The focus of Dr. Ou’s talk was on 3D medical images, for AI’s application in disease diagnosis, outcome prediction, early screening, neuroscience, and others. Dr. Ou then discussed some major challenges and potential opportunities, including further improving accuracy in detecting small diffuse lesions, and facilitating AI in small sample sizes.