Deep Learning • LITFL • CODA ZERO

Deep Learning – Pushing the boundaries of health AI. How do we make it fair and the data safe? with Martin Seneviratne

Over the last 5 years there has actually been a confluence of a few different historical threats. We’ve had health data being increasingly digitalised and we’ve had the proliferation of accessible massive scale computing, both of which have un-locked a technique developed in the early 80’s called deep learning, which is really good at pattern recognition over large data sets.

Key trends in the last year include the first randomised clinical trials in the clinical application of AI in health, the potential for AI in clinical discovery particularly using multimodal data (including electronic medical records, imaging data, genomic data) and combining that to find patterns in very large data sets. This is the real beginning of precision medicine.

Finally there are day to day clinical process applications being used to predict resource allocation or disease outbreaks. At the same time there are some systemic challenges facing AI in health, including workflow integration, bias, equity and just access. How can we mitigate these biases and make them fair.

Finally how do we make this sensitive data safe? Is the answer Federated machine learning where we send the AI algorithms out to local networks and apply them there?

The Presentation

The Podcast

The Speaker

Martin Seneviratne [@martin_sen] is an Australian doctor now working as a research scientist in the AI research team at Google Health (formerly DeepMind), based in London. His work focuses on applications of machine learning to electronic health record data.

Martin received a John Monash Scholarship in 2017 to pursue a Masters at Stanford University, focusing on machine learning with medical records. He currently works as a research scientist at Google DeepMind in London.

Previously, Martin trained as a junior doctor at the Royal Prince Alfred Hospital and was deeply involved in the digital health community in Australia. He served on the board of the Health Informatics Society of Australia (HISA), as a clinical reference lead for the Australian Digital Health Agency, and worked on the digital health startup CancerAid.

Martin Seneviratne holds a BSc(Hons) and MBBS(Hons) from the University of Sydney and an MS(Biomedical Informatics) from Stanford.

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