Dr Ross Mitchell, AI for Precision Health Recap

Artificial intelligence offers the promise of transforming healthcare. On Jan. 25, Dr Ross Mitchell (Professor, University of Alberta) -- newly-announced Amii Fellow and inaugural Alberta Health Services Chair in Artificial Intelligence in Health -- gave a presentation as part of the Faculty of Medicine’s Dean’s Lecture series on the opportunities, challenges and solutions regarding implementing artificial intelligence into healthcare.

Mitchell has 30 years of experience working in medical imaging, artificial intelligence and machine learning in healthcare, working with organizations like the University of Calgary, the Mayo Clinic and, most recently, the Moffitt Cancer Center.

In his presentation, AI for Precision Health: Opportunities and Challenges, Mitchell details several artificial intelligence techniques with promising medical applications, breaking down some of their possible uses. They include:

Convolutional Neural Networks, a computer vision algorithm that can help identify features in medical imaging;

Reinforcement learning, which has been used to study protein folding, a process that could lead to a better understanding of diseases and new drugs;

Natural Language Processing Transformers, initially developed for language translation, have applications in extracting information from medical notes and charts.

He caps off the presentation by explaining why now was the right time for his return to Alberta, as he sees Edmonton having many of the conditions needed to advance innovations in medical AI and machine learning:

• large amounts of population-level health data;
• a strong AI ecosystem, including the University of Alberta and Amii, to help foster and attract talent;
• visionary leadership in the healthcare system that is willing to work towards innovative AI implementation.

Learn more by watching the full presentation:

Find out more about the work of Amii's Fellows and CIFAR Chairs, including advancements in medical artificial intelligence, on our Research page.