Innovation and technology
When she was four years old, Peyton was diagnosed with myocarditis, severe inflammation of the heart. She suffered a cardiac arrest and stroke so severe that her heart was permanently damaged, leaving her dependent on machines until a donor heart came through. Dr. Anna Goldenberg and Dr. Peter Laussen, chief of Critical Care Medicine at SickKids, are working to create an early-warning system to predict these sudden cardiac events – before they get so critical. supplied
Artificial intelligence helping to make medicine and care more personalized and proactive
Imagine your newborn daughter is diagnosed with a serious congenital heart defect. You can’t quite fathom a tiny infant having open-heart surgery, but the surgeon assures you the survival rate is well above 90 per cent. After the five-hour procedure, your baby looks to be recovering well. Then, quite suddenly, her heart starts to fail. The clinical team springs into action, and you watch helplessly as they resuscitate her. Her heart starts beating again and she’s back on the road to recovery. You’re grateful to the team that saved her, and overwhelmed by the thought that you could have lost her. But what if doctors had seen this coming? What if they’d had time to prepare or even prevent the crisis? This is the promise of artificial intelligence (AI) in medicine. And because of donor support, SickKids is poised to drive the field forward.
In January, SickKids launched AIM (AI in Medicine for Kids), a donor-funded initiative that brings together computer scientists and clinicians to implement AI projects across the hospital, signalling a palpable momentum in computational medicine. Dr. Ronald Cohn, SickKids president and CEO, says, “We are at an unprecedented time in scientific discovery and computational technology. And we have a unique opportunity to improve human health by focusing on our most vulnerable time – childhood.”
AIM found early support from the Canadian tech industry. Formed in 2017, Tech4SickKids is a fundraising initiative with a goal of $25-million toward big data projects and building a modern new hospital able to support the limitless possibilities of AI. Fittingly, the first major contribution came from Toronto entrepreneur Amar Varma to fund a Chair in Bioinformatics and Artificial Intelligence – the first of its kind in Canada. It was awarded to Dr. Anna Goldenberg, a noted computer scientist with a keen interest in applying AI “for good.”
“To be able to help children is so important because they have their whole life ahead of them,” she says. “We can actually make a huge difference here.”
As the newest member of the AIM team, Melissa McCradden, inaugural fellow of Ethics of AI in Healthcare and staff bioethicist, makes sure the tools being refined in the lab work in the real world. “Medicine is so complex, so how we move AI from the research space into clinical care must be carefully considered,” she says.
Looking to infuse cold hard algorithms with transparency, fairness and the messiness of humanity, Dr. McCradden also flags ethical implications, including biases. For example, do the data inputs equitably represent the patient population? How can AI-aided decisions be explained to patients and families?
Every diagnosis and treatment decision can benefit from the insights of big data, and data-driven medicine will be personalized and proactive. It will predict and prevent so that one day, when a baby is recovering from open-heart surgery, doctors will be able to see a crisis coming and do everything to stop it.
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