14 Apr How Artificial Intelligence (AI) Will Potentiate Individualized Medicine, Q&A with Eric Topol

ERIC TOPOL

PMWC LUMINARY AWARD
Pioneered genetics & genomics in cardiovascular medicine and led the era of wireless medicine

M.D., Executive VP & Professor, Molecular Medicine, The Scripps Research Institute

Dr. Eric Topol, voted by a Modern Healthcare national poll as the most influential physician executive in the US, will present & be honored at the Precision Medicine World Conference PMWC 2018 Michigan June 6-7.

We had the chance to sit down with Dr. Topol to hear his thoughts on big data, digital health, sensors, and artificial intelligence, some of the newest precision medicine technologies.

Here’s a part of that conversation. See the full interview

We discussed major challenges for these tools to potentiate individualized medicine.

• Data Ownership: Our number one problem today is the inability for people to have all of their data. No one has all that data, unlike places like Estonia and other countries where patients have and own all that data. To maximize the data’s impact a vital flip must occur. Instead of health systems and doctors owning the data, people need to own their data. And patients will very happily share that data with specific health providers, doctors, and others.
• Analysis: What we have today is lots of in silico analysis and retrospective validation, but that is not good enough to change medicine. We need to see all of these things, whether it is retinal diagnosis, an EKG, or a heart arrhythmia, any type of medical scan, cancer pathology slides, or skin lesions—validated prospectively so that the medical community can accept it. None of this has been done to date.
• Security & Privacy: The seemingly endless sea of data breaches we hear about across industries – whether it be Facebook or MyFitnessPal – cannot be tolerated in the medical world. This is another reason why people have to own their data and on a secure platform, like Blockchain or a private cloud. Massive data servers are incredibly attractive to cyber thieves and hackers and medical data sells for 5-fold more than personal financial data on the Dark Web.

Dr. Topol’s keynote at PMWC Michigan, “The Future of Individualized Medicine”, addresses these challenges.

In addition, PMWC Michigan will include a number of sessions dedicated to data such as:

• “The Promise of Precision Medicine for All of Us”
  Francis Collins (National Institutes of Health – NIH)
• “Transforming Big Data Into Actionable Information”
  Nancy Cox (Vanderbilt University), Eric Lefkofsky (Tempus), Michael Boehnke (UMich), Anil Sethi (Ciitizen), Goncalo Abecasis (UMich) and Isaac Kohane (Harvard)
• “Better Health Outcomes via Knowledge Networks, AI, and Technical Innovation”
  India Hook-Barnard (UCSF), Pratik Mukherjee (UCSF), and Shelly Greenfield (UC Irvine) among other thought leaders
• AI and Data Sciences Showcase
  Arcascope, Athelas, Ayasdi, Ciitizen, Data4Cure, DataSpeaks, Genomatix, Genomenon, IBM Watson Health, iNDx Technology, IQVIA, ISAAC Corp, Henry Ford Health System, Medical College of Wisconsin, Mendel.ia, Parabricks, University of Windsor, Wayne State University
• Health Monitoring Showcase
  Arborsense among others
• Wellness and Aging Showcase
  JOOL Health and VA Ann Arbor Health System, among others

This is a great opportunity for everyone in the field to engage in important discussions on data sharing, data ownership, creating prospective algorithms, and data security/privacy, all of which will impact the future of individualized medicine.

Looking forward to seeing many of you at the upcoming PMWC 2018 Michigan conference scheduled for June 6-7, Ann Arbor, MI.