Artificial Intelligence as an “augmented reality” in which clinicians can identify in advance the appearance of symptoms, their evolution and the general condition of the patient. So Professor Maurizio Cecconi, Head of Anesthesia and Intensive Care at Humanitas and elected president of the European Society of Intensive Care ESICM imagines the medicine of the future. Artificial intelligence, big data and machine learning promise much: they will be the algorithms of health and will allow to make many steps forward in precision medicine. These scenarios, particularly in relation to intensive care, will be discussed from today, Friday, February 1, to Sunday, February 3 during the Milan Critical Care Datathon and ESICM’s Big Datatalk, for the first time in Italy at Humanitas Research Hospital in Rozzano. It is a European scientific event organized by Professor Cecconi together with the Politecnico di Milano, ESICM and MIT in Boston.
A revolution that starts with data management
Today’s physicians, compared to those of the past, find themselves managing an ever-greater amount of data. While this is a potential advantage, there is also the problem of finding a way to interpret and cross them. The cross use of large volume of medical information not only allows and will always allow more and more to arrive first at the diagnosis, but also to generate new research hypotheses and to expand more and more the field of preventive medicine.
The Milan Critical Care Datathon and ESICM’s Big Datatalk
Cecconi explained: “How this revolution is about to happen will be discussed during the Milan Critical Care Datathon and ESICM’s Big Datatalk Milano, a European scientific event organized by Cecconi together with the Politecnico di Milano, ESICM and MIT of Boston, with 300 members from all over the world”.
“Having algorithms that allow us, for example, to intervene on the basis of the real-time evolution of the patient’s physiological parameters means realizing precision medicine – continued the professor -. In addition to algorithms and computational power, we need a global programming that allows you to share data between institutions and nations. Finally, the training of clinicians is fundamental”.
Collaboration between doctors and engineers
In order to exploit the enormous potential of existing and incoming tools, doctors will have to learn to collaborate more and more with computer scientists and engineers, learning new languages and new skills.
“The new tools will join the clinician’s skills, supporting him – explains Cecconi -: knowing how they work will become a prerequisite for their use. It is not a question of inserting an automatic pilot, but of handling new and powerful tools”.
For this reason, in parallel with the conference work, here is an initiative conceived by Professor Maurizio Cecconi, who returned to Italy after 14 years in the United Kingdom. The “MIT Critical Care Datathon” will be a competition in which teams made up of doctors, engineers and scientists will have to devise solutions to solve clinical questions using the anonymized data of 200 thousand patients contained in a database of MIT intensive care. The three best performing solutions will be presented at the end of September in Berlin, at the 32nd annual congress of the European Society of Intensive Care ESICM.
