Mainebiz

V O L . X X X N O. V M A R C H 4 , 2 0 2 4 20 L I F E S C I E N C E S / B I O T E C H H ospitals and research labs are leveraging big health data to prevent, diagnose and treat disease, conduct early research and accelerate drug discovery. According to a recent panel hosted by the Roux Institute at Northeastern University, artificial intelligence has the potential to transform Maine's health care and life sciences sectors through use in clinical practice, in research and "translational medicine," and in hospi- tal operations — all involving massive amounts of data to compute on behalf of human health. e life sciences community is adopting AI for its ability to drastically reduce the time needed to translate massive amounts of continuously generated data into treatments and therapies for clinical use. Researchers are also careful to emphasize that clinical practice will never depend solely on AI-generated findings. ere will always be humans in the mix who will use the findings as one more informational tool on which to base their practices. "We'll see a blossoming of AI and machine learning approaches in understanding the fundamental basis of disease and how to target cures," says Raimond Winslow, director of life sciences and medical research at the Roux Institute in Portland. Countless blips e Roux Institute is working with MaineHealth on a project called HEART, for Health Care Enabled by AI in Real Time. e project looks at how to better identify cardiac arrest patients at risk of serious complications and to prevent adverse events while they're recovering from heart surgery. "A lot of data is looked at all the time by clinicians but not necessarily cap- tured in a way that can lead to the more sophisticated analysis that machine learning can do," says Dr. Douglas Sawyer, HEART's lead and Maine Health's chief academic officer. Typically, data generated by devices such as heart monitors are ephemeral. ey appear as blips and are gone. e goal is to capture the countless blips generated by all of the devices used in a patient's care and analyze patterns. Teams from Northeastern University and MaineHealth began the project two years ago as an experiment using a limited number of retrospective data elements collected by hand from thousands of patients for decades. e retrospective sets were used to build a clinically useful AI-enabled predic- tion tool, which proved successful at the theoretical level. e next phase launched in January with the ongoing collection of real-time P H O T O / T I M G R E E N WAY — I L L U S T R AT I O N / M AT T S E LVA W I T H A D O B E F I R E F LY A I AI crunches health care data For the medical field, artificial intelligence takes on a mountain of data B y L a u r i e S c h r e i b e r A lot of data is looked at all the time by clinicians but not necessarily captured in a way that can lead to the more sophisticated analysis that machine learning can do. — Dr. Douglas Sawyer MaineHealth From left, MaineHealth Chief Academic Officer Doug Sawyer, Roux Institute data scientist Rai Winslow, MaineHealth project manager Felistas Mazhude and MaineHealth cardiac surgeon Bob Kramer in an intensive care unit room in the cardiac surgery intensive care unit at Maine Medical Center in Portland. The monitor behind them is among the equipment used in the AI project. F O C U S

• Cover