Trending News Today: Predictive AI Causes Privacy Concerns

A London-based artificial intelligence company has developed a system that can analyze a patient’s health records, such as blood tests, and predict acute kidney disease up to 48 hours before onset; however, the technique has caused privacy concerns, according to the New York Times. A British government agency had previously ruled that DeepMind, under the parent company of Google, had transferred records to the American company, which prompted complaints from privacy advocates in Britain and abroad. Using a technique known as neural network to learn tasks by analyzing data, the system is closely related to the current technology Google uses to recognize faces in photos, identify spoken words, etc, according to the article.

A combination of rituximab plus ibrutinib kept patients with chronic lymphocytic leukemia disease-free and alive longer than the current standard of care in a recent trial, according to the Stanford Medicine News Center. Researchers believe the results of the trial are likely to change how most people with the common blood cancer are treated in the future. Through the trial, 98.8% of the participants randomly assigned to receive the drug combination were alive after 3 years versus 91.5% of those who had received the standard 3-drug combination treatment.

A study from Australia has found high levels of protection in women who received 1 dose of the HPV vaccine, according to Forbes. The possibility that just 1 dose can be highly protective is encouraging given the low rates of return for second doses and the fact that the HPV vaccine injection tends to be more painful than most other vaccines, according to the article. The study authors believe that if 1 dose could prevent pre-cancerous cervical lesions, then global cervical cancer prevention would be greatly improved, the article reported.