AI in Health: the Future of Research and Application – June 25, 2020

Healthcare systems around the world are continually developing strategies to individualize care, improve outcomes and contain costs. Particularly, AI in healthcare is a burgeoning field, used today in applications such as diagnostic processes, treatment tools, drug discovery and development, remote patient monitoring and more.

Inaugural AI in Health Event

On June 25, 2020, attendees of the inaugural AI in Health event heard from some of our province’s most talented medical professionals and leading AI researchers, including:

• Lawrence Richer MD, MSc, FRCPC – Academic Lead, Precision Health Signature Initiative, and Associate Dean, Clinical and Translational Research at the Faculty of Medicine & Dentistry at the University of Alberta
• Dr. Russ Greiner, with a feature presentation on survival prediction for liver transplant patients
• Dr. Brenda Hemmelgarn, Dean of the Faculty of Medicine & Dentistry at the University of Alberta
• Cam Linke, CEO of Amii

Feature presentation by Dr. Russ Greiner

Which Liver Patients to Waitlist for a New Liver: Motivating A Novel Survival Prediction Model and Evaluation Measure

Deciding which patient should be waitlisted for a liver transplant should depend on utility, the patient’s chance of long-term survival with the graft. However, most survival models use only risk scores, which are discriminative (can compare predicted outcomes between patients), but are not measuring the desired characteristic: utility for a single patient. This motivated us to develop and use a novel type of predictor that can produce an “Individual Survival Distribution” for each patient.

This presentation first overviews standard survival analysis models to discuss what each can (and cannot) do, to motivate our approach. We then discuss the issue of evaluating these models, leading to a novel evaluation method (D-calibration). Finally, we show that this approach works effectively, leading to a deployed system to help hepatologists make this critical decision for their patients.

Special thanks to the event partners

• The University of Alberta Faculty of Medicine & Dentistry
• Roche

View all of Amii’s upcoming events.