Its a big claim, Dartmouth College Professor Gene Santos Jr. admits, but he thinks his artificial intelligence tool can help doctors come up with a cancer cure.

We're trying to build this fundamental fabric to build that playbook together, so that it makes sense, and so you can start mixing existing playbooks, Santos said.

Santos and his team of Dartmouth engineering colleagues, along with Joseph Gormley, Director of Advanced Systems Development at Tufts Clinical and Translational Science Institute and his colleagues, as well as industry partner IOMICS, are working on a $34 million National Institutes of Health program to develop the artificial intelligence tool to bring together all known cancer research.

The plan is to develop an AI-based system that analyzes patients clinical and genomic data and the relationship between biochemical pathways that drive health and disease, Santos said.

Were trying to find new connections that people have not seen, Santos said. We believe this system will generate new insights, accelerating the work of the biomedical researcher.

The research is already out there, and it is already being collected into knowledge databases. Santos and his team are working on developing the tool called the Pathway Hypothesis Knowledgebase, or PHK, which will analyze the data and come up with treatment plans.

Santos said the data and research available isnt always complete, and some of it is inconsistent.

Data is noisy, and data can be inconsistent, Santos said.

Different terms are used to describe the same subject from hospital to hospital, and not all hospitals and researchers use a universal set of measurements. The PHK will account for the inconsistencies and contradictions in the data, helping doctors see through the research and find the cures, Santos said.

With the PHK, doctors could treat a patient using historical data of other patients with similar symptoms and genomic profiles, according to Santos. It could also be used to determine additional uses for approved drugs already on the market, and could quickly determine treatments to new diseases, such as COVID-19.

Santos hopes to have PHK in the hands of personal physicians in the next decade, but he thinks the tool will start to bear fruit for researchers in the next three to five years.

We will impact how we treat cancer and a multitude of complex multi-faceted diseases, said Santos.

Were closer than we think. I think we can get there, Santos said.

The researchers presented a completed prototype in March and were notified in June that they had been selected to continue their research. In the coming years, the team hopes to use the prototype with additional analytical, reasoning and learning tools that are being developed by other groups to build the Biomedical Data Translator to fully implement the system for use by researchers, according to Santos.

View post:

Dartmouth professor working on AI cancer cure | Education - The Union Leader