StemCell Therapy

A condition that has no cure. A condition that has very generic risk factors. And, a condition that could make your life living hell.

Rheumatoid Arthritis (RA), is a condition that causes a person's immune system to attack their body cells, leading to severe damage to bones and cartilage. Symptoms include joint pain, weakness and inflammation around joints. RA affects over 400,000 people in the UK and is an autoimmune disease. As mentioned, an overactive immune system leads to it, but the reason behind such activity is something we yet do not know.

RA has no cure so far. And so, the only way to treat it is by giving immunosuppressants (medicine that reduces the activity of the immune system) or physiotherapy to ease joint pain. However, AI has been introduced to the RA landscape and so far, there have been studies on how it could help detect signs of RA early on, so minimal damage is done.

A study in 2019 from an American medical journal, JAMA Network Open was conducted, with a cohort of 116 and 117 RA patients. These were across a university hospital and a safety-net hospital. The model aimed to predict disease activity for a patient the next time they visited an RA clinic. Though the way of measurement is quite complex, the way the model performed was measured by calculating the area underneath a receiver operating characteristic curve (AUROC). This is a graphical plot that shows how well a system can distinguish between two groups. The conclusion came out to be 0.91 (university hospital) and 0.74 (safety-net hospital). Though to us, these results may not seem as much, to the researchers they showed that forecasting RA is possible with AI if data and AI models can be shared across hospitals.

Another very important advancement in the RA field was accomplished by healthcare start-up Living With, at the University of Bath, alongside the Royal United Hospitals Bath NHS Foundation Trust (RUH). A flare-up in medical terms is where the symptoms for a disease get worse, and that's when the disease is most active. These flare-ups can be difficult to predict. Living With have developed a Flare Profiler using smartphone technology and thermal imaging to stop the long-term harm from RA. A side-goal for Living With, is for RA patients to not always see a consultant each time they want to know how their body is coping up. They could see a specialist nurse, who would just need to interpret the data coming from the profiler. The profiler comes in the form of an app and will use AI to recognise disease patterns and then provide different routes for treatment.

Link:
How AI Is Slowly, But Steadily, Affecting The Treatment Of Rheumatoid Arthritis. - AI Daily

This entry was posted on July 9, 2020 at 10:45 pm and is filed under Arthritis. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed. |