One of the areas where scientific achievements are applied most actively is medicine. It is there that the latest developments of Russian scientists can save lives and give patients hope for recovery even in the most hopeless situations. Details about how scientific achievements are changing Russian medicine were found out by Izvestia.
Important discoveries
One of the main difficulties for today’s science is the large amount of accumulated knowledge and the speed with which it is multiplied. Scientific knowledge is becoming more complex, and this leads to a decrease in the number of significant discoveries and radical research.says Sergei Salkutsan, director of the St. Petersburg Innovation and Youth Initiatives Support Fund, in an interview with Izvestia.
At the end of the last century, the scientific revolution was associated with the introduction of computer technology and the emergence of new ways of converting energy. Active digitalization, the growth of computing power of equipment, the development of technologies using AI and machine learning – all this expands the possibilities of data analysis and creates the basis for a leap in the development of science.
“For medicine, the democratization of DNA sequencing technology has become a big step. If ten years ago this decryption took years and cost hundreds of millions of dollars, today 24 hours and about $1,000 are enough.Salkutsan notes.
This year a major discovery was made in Russia – the identification of the mechanism of “molecular switching” of DNA. For more than 70 years, it was believed that DNA stores and processes genetic information through the structure of a double helix – uniquely corresponding to each other (complementary) molecular chains. However, the scientist Maxim Nikitin managed to refute this fact.
Nikitin, head of the Nanobiomedicine department at Sirius University, head of the MIPT laboratory, proved that it is not necessary for DNA to form a double helix for effective information processing. DNA can store and transmit information due to weak affinity interactions that occur when molecules have low affinity for each other. Moreover, he showed that short DNA, even the most non-complementary to a gene, can regulate its work. This changes the whole idea of one of the main paradigms of biology.
An open phenomenon can become the key to understanding the nature of a wide variety of processes: from the unsolved mysteries of genetics, complex diseases, the creation of safe vaccines, instant memory and aging, to questions of the origin of life on Earth and its evolution.
Application of AI in medicine
According to Sergey Salkutsan, AI is a promising technology in medicine that opens up a variety of opportunities: improving the accuracy of diagnostics (especially in the early stages of pathology, when the human eye can simply not notice the smallest change), selecting optimal treatment methods in a short time, creating new drugs and automating the work of a doctor.
In Russia in 2019 was adopted strategy development of AI. One of its key areas was the development of the AI-based software market for healthcare.
— The most common uses of AI today are the analysis of medical images, the prediction and diagnosis of diseases. The first is the most promising direction in Russia, its meaning is that the system is trained to identify various pathologies, and some solutions are already being used in clinical practice (among the examples – SberMed AI, “Celsus, Botkin.AI, CheckDerm)– says the interlocutor of Izvestia.
In 2022, as an experiment, the Foundation for Supporting Innovation and Youth Initiatives of St. Petersburg launched a competition for breakthrough scientific projects using AI – Blue Sky Research. Scientists from different universities formed interdisciplinary teams and looked for solutions to problems at the intersection of chemistry and AI technologies.
Many of these projects were related to medicine. Eg, Scientists from the Siberian Federal University, together with doctors from the Krasnoyarsk Territory, created an intelligent system for predicting myocardial infarction. This algorithm will help doctors choose the tactics of treating patients several times faster in order to reduce the risk of complications. Doctors have 30–40 minutes in the emergency room, which is the shortest time to make such an important decision.
The system, invented by scientists, analyzes about 40 parameters that determine the patient’s condition (gender, age, pulse, pressure, etc.). After that, based on the algorithms embedded in it, trained on a set of data, it selects the best treatment option.
“Similar studies are being carried out by different scientific groups, the task here is to make these results accessible to doctors,” says Oleslav Antamoshkin, Doctor of Technical Sciences, head of the artificial intelligence laboratory at the Siberian Federal University.
According to him, in this case, the task is not to replace the doctor with artificial intelligence – it only helps to make technology more accessible to doctors and help them find non-obvious patterns that will help save the patient.
Another example given by Sergey Salkutsan is the project of the Don State Technical University. A team of scientists, together with doctors, analyzed glial brain tumors. According to the WHO, any such tumor in the brain is a fatal disease for which there is no cure. Therefore, accurate diagnosis is important for patients, giving the most precious thing – time.
A neural network trained to recognize cells with signs of a tumor makes the diagnostic process more automated.
“This will allow, on the one hand, to recognize the diagnosis faster, and on the other hand, to reduce the number of possible errors due to the human factor,” explains Evgenia Kirichenko, Doctor of Biological Sciences, Head of the Department of Bioengineering at the Don State Technical University.
Now scientists are testing their ideas and getting results with which they can attract funding in order to enter the market in the future.
Pandemic tested
So far, radiology remains the most active area of penetration of artificial intelligence in healthcare, where AI has already proven itself as an important tool in making diagnoses, determining areas of interest in images, calculating various important parameters using x-rays, mammography, CT and MRI, says in an interview with Izvestia the director of acceleration in the direction of “Digital Medicineº of the cluster of biomedical technologies of the Skolkovo Foundation” Sergey Voinov.
“It is especially important to introduce such systems for mass screenings, medical examinations of risk groups for a number of diseases, on a regional scale and the country as a whole. Such systems had a significant impact on the speed and quality of processing CT examinations during the peak moments of the COVID-19 pandemic, – the expert notes.
According to him, now AI can determine a fairly large range of pathologies in various types of studies. Among the most important are the detection of lung cancer by CT examination of the chest, breast cancer in the framework of mammography studies, typing and calculation of the volume of the lesion in stroke by CT of the head, and much more.
— One of the largest experiments on the introduction of AI in radiology has been taking place in Moscow for the third year. However, AI has already been tested in practice in other regions of the country, says Voinov.
The introduction of technologies and the search for optimal ways to use artificial intelligence in the framework of practical healthcare remains one of the key tasks of the fund at the federal level. In addition to helping the doctor, AI systems have a serious effect in mass diagnostic processes. And now the technology can be considered tested and ready for widespread use, concludes the expert.
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