The Department of Veterans Affairs https://www.va.gov has approved a medical research partnership with DeepMind https://deepmind.com to address patient deterioration during hospital care which accounts for eleven percent of in-hospital deaths worldwide.
DeepMind a leader in artificial intelligence research has been partnering with hospitals in the United Kingdom to apply innovative machine learning algorithms to research projects studying eye disease, health and neck cancer, and mammography.
The partnership will focus on analyzing patterns from about 700,000 historical depersonalized health records. The plan is to develop machine learning algorithms that will accurately identify risk factors for patient deterioration and predict the onset for the patient.
Initial work will focus on identifying the most common signs of risk, like Acute Kidney Injury (AKI), a problem that can lead to dialysis or death, but is preventable if detected early. The VA and DeepMind realize that AKI is difficult to predict which frequently occurs following routine procedures, and can strike people of all ages.
Eventually similar approaches will be applied to other signs of patient deterioration which should lead to improved care for many more patients and hopefully fewer people will develop serious infections and conditions.