Showing posts with label public health. Show all posts
Showing posts with label public health. Show all posts

AI Powered Custom COVID 19 Healthcare Bot


The CDC COVID19 Healthcare bot 


The CDC's COVID-19 bot is meant to quickly assess symptoms and risk factors and suggest a next course of action (like see a doctor or just stay home). Microsoft's Healthcare Bot runs on Azure and was first made publicly available in February 2019.

The bot service originally  began as a research project in 2017. That bot service allows users to create chat bots and AI-powered health assistants using Microsoft's service. 

The Healthcare Bot service can integrate with Electronic Health Records. In addition to the CDC, customers using this service to build their own bots include Quest Diagnostics and Kaiser Permanente. Providence St. Joseph Health also is using a COVID-19 screening service built using Microsoft's Healthcare bot technology.

Microsoft's AI powered Healthcare bot service is meant to guide customers via a natural conversation experience. It is customizable so that it can fit in with an organization's own scenarios and protocols.

In addition to the underlying bot service, several customizable COVID-19 response templates have also been made available. These include a COVID-19 risk assessment based on CDC guidelines; COVID-19 clinical triage based on CDC protocols; COVID-19 answers to frequently asked questions; and COVID-19 worldwide metrics.





An Overview of the Microsoft Healthcare Bot




Conversational AI for Healthcare: A cloud service that empowers healthcare organizations to build and deploy, AI-powered virtual health assistants and chatbots that can be used to enhance their processes, self-service, and cost reduction efforts.

Built-in healthcare intelligence: The Healthcare Bot comes with built-in healthcare AI services, including a symptom checker and medical content from known industry resources, and language understanding models that are tuned to understand medical and clinical terminology.

Customizable: You will receive your own white-labeled bot instance that can be embedded within your app or website. You can customize the built-in functionality and extend to introduce your own business flows through simple and intuitive visual editing tools.

Compliance: The service aligns to industry and globally recognized security and compliance standards such as ISO 27001, 27018, and CSA Gold and GDPR and provides tools that help our partners create HIPAA compliant solutions. 

Out-of-the-box AI and world knowledge capabilities: While each health bot instance is highly customizable and extensible, the Health Bot Service is built with a wide range of out-of-the-box features. 
  • The Health Bot Service leverages information from respected healthcare industry data sources to generate accurate and relevant responses. 
  • The Health Bot Service enables meaningful conversations for patients with an interactive symptom checker and uses medical content databases to answer health questions. 
  • Conversational intelligence supports layperson natural language conversations to flow and adapt dynamically as each health bot instance learns from previous interactions. The service intelligence is powered by Microsoft Cognitive Services and credible world knowledge.



Configurable and extensible:

The Health Bot Service provides endless flexibility of use to Microsoft partners:
  • Unique scenarios can be authored by partners for their health bot instances to extend the baseline scenarios and support their own flows.
  • The health bot instance's behavior can be configured to match the partner's use cases, processes, and scenarios.
  • The health bot instance can easily be connected to partners' information systems---for example, systems that manage EMR, health information, and customer information.
  • The health bot instance can be easily integrated into other systems such as web sites, chat channels, and digital personal assistants.
Security and Privacy: The information handled by each instance of the Health Bot Service is privacy protected to HIPAA standards and secured to the highest standards for privacy and security by Microsoft. 

Built on top of Microsoft Azure technology, the Azure architecture powers the Health Bot Service's ability to scale with resilience, while maintaining the highest standards of privacy and security.

Easy to manage: Each health bot instance is easily managed and monitored by Microsoft partners via the Health Bot Service's management portal and management API. The management portal provides the ability to define the health bot instance's behavior in fine detail and to monitor usage with built-in reports. Management API allows the partner to embed the health bot instance and to securely exchange data and information.



Common Use-case scenarios:

The Health Bot Service contains built-in scenarios. Additional scenarios may be authored through the Scenario Editor.




The built-in scenarios include the following:

  • Triage/symptom checker, powered by built-in medical protocols: The end user describes a symptom to the health bot instance and the bot helps the user to understand it and suggests how to react; for example, "I have a headache."
  • General information about conditions, symptoms, causes, complications, and more: Loaded with medical content, the health bot instance can provide information about medical conditions, symptoms, causes, and complications; for example, "information about diabetes," "what are the causes of malaria," "tell me about the complications of arthritis."
  • Find doctor type: The health bot instance can recommend the appropriate type of doctor to treat an illness; for example, "What type of doctor treats diabetes?"
Examples of scenarios that are typically built by customers as extensions using the scenario authoring elements include the following:

  • Health plan inquiries: Your health bot instance can be customized to access information about health plan details, such as pricing and benefits.
  • Finding providers: Your health bot instance can allow customers to search for doctors by specialty, in-network status, and other specifications.
  • Scheduling appointments: Your health bot instance can be designed to allow your customers to schedule appointments easily and securely.





Deploying your Custom COVID-19 Healthcare Bot 


Public healthcare providers on the frontline of COVID-19 response have had to act quickly to support the sudden spike in inquiries from patients and constituents looking to get answers to a common set of requests such as, 
  • Up-to-date outbreak information, 
  • Symptoms 
  • Risk factors for people worried about infection
  • Suggest a next course of action. 


Many of these providers have expressed concerns with being able to support the volumes of inquiries, and consequently have been using the Microsoft Healthcare Bot to help provide critical information to their patients.

In a nutshell Microsoft’s Healthcare Bot  is a scalable Azure-based SaaS solution that empowers Microsoft customers and partners to build and deploy compliant, AI-powered health agents, allowing them to offer their users intelligent, personalized access to health-related information and interactions through a natural conversation experience. 

It is one solution that uses AI to help the CDC and other frontline organizations to provide help to those who need it.

The Healthcare Bot can easily be customized to suit an organizations scenarios and protocols. 

To assist in the rapid deployment of COVID-19 specific bots Microsoft has made available a set of COVID-19 templates that customers can use and modify:

  • COVID-19 Risk Assessment
  • COVID-19 Frequently Asked Questions
  • COVID-19 Worldwide metrics
  • COVID-19 Clinical Triage

To help you deploy your COVID-19 healthcare bot, Microsoft has created a Reference architecture, deployment template.



Reference Architecture

The reference architecture provides guidance on a High Availability deployment of the Healthcare Bot and associated Azure services across 2 regions.



Note: The architecture can also be deployed in a single region, if you choose to deploy in a single region it is recommended that you model and estimate your peak traffic expectations to ensure that a single region deployment is appropriate for your situation.

Alternate Schematic Representation with Workflow:



Note: 

  • Unless otherwise noted explicitly, the first region listed in the locations parameter (array) will represent the primary region and the second will denote the secondary region.
  • The ARM template parameter name has to be unique for each Health Bot deployment. Use an alpha numberic value for this name parameter. All Azure resources deployed by the ARM template will have names prefixed with this deployment name.
  • Azure Traffic Manager is used to shift the Web Chat Client and QnA Maker API traffic across the individual Azure App Service instances deployed in the two regions. The end user (customer) is responsible for configuring the respective traffic routing algorithm in the Traffic Manager to ensure the traffic is split evenly between the App Service instances as per their requirements.




Deployment Template


To assist in deploying the reference architecture Microsoft has developed an ARM template for you to use. The step by step instruction to deploy and configure the reference architecture can be found here: Deploy Microsoft Health Bot Reference Architecture

To then set up your Health Bot – follow the instruction in the Quick Start: Setting Up Your COVID-19 Health Bot

If you are ready to deploy and would like assistance:  

  1. Contact your account team for a quick demo and/ or alignment of resources.
  2. Speak to one of our Health Bot Partners who can help you deploy and customize your own COVID-19 Health Bot.

Additional Resources:




Supercomputing Mobilizing against COVID19

Tech has been taking some heavy losses from the coronavirus pandemic. Global supply chains have been disrupted, virtually every major tech conference taking place over the next few months has been canceled, and supercomputer facilities have even begun preemptively restricting visitor access. But tech is striking back, and hard: day by day, more and more organizations are dedicating supercomputing power toward the effort to diagnose, understand and fight back against COVID-19.

Testing for COVID-19

Before supercomputers began spinning up to find a cure, researchers were scrambling to simply diagnose the disease as cases in China’s Hubei province spun out of control.

With limited (and rapidly iterated) test kits available, Chinese researchers turned to AI and supercomputing for answers. They trained an AI model on China’s first petascale supercomputer, Tianhe-1, with the aim of distinguishing between the CT scans of pneumonic patients with COVID-19 and patients with non-COVID-19 pneumonia.

In a paper, the researchers reported nearly 80% accuracy when testing this method against external datasets, dramatically outperforming early test kits as well as human radiologists:





The Summit supercomputer. The big gun was brought out early:




One of the first systems to join the fight was the world’s most powerful publicly-ranked supercomputer: Summit. Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) pitted Summit’s 148 Linpack petaflops of performance against a crucial “spike” protein on the coronavirus that researchers believe may be key to disabling its ability to infect. Testing how various compounds interact with key virus components can be an extremely time-consuming task, so the researchers – a team from ORNL’s Center for Molecular Biophysics –  were granted a discretionary time allocation on Summit, which allowed them to cycle through 8,000 compounds within a few days.

Using Summit, the research time identified 77 compounds that may be promising candidates for testing by medical researchers. “Summit was needed to rapidly get the simulation results we needed. It took us a day or two whereas it would have taken months on a normal computer,” said Jeremy Smith, director of UT/ORNL CMB and principal researcher for the study. The researchers are preparing to repeat the study using a new, higher-quality model of the spike protein recently made available.

Major organizations have opened their doors – and wallets – for coronavirus computing proposals

Last week, the National Science Foundation (NSF) issued a Dear Colleague Letter expressing interest in proposals for “non-medical, non-clinical-care research that can be used immediately to be understand how to model and understand the spread of COVID-19; to inform and educate about the science of virus transmission and prevention; and to encourage the development of processes and actions to address this global challenge.” Two days later, it issued another Dear Colleague Letter specifically inviting rapid response research proposals for COVID-19 computing activities through its Office of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure. As a complement to existing funding opportunities, the NSF also invited requests for supplemental funding.

Even with their quick response, though, the NSF weren’t the first to open their pocketbooks. In January, the European Commission announced a €10 million call for expressions of interest for projects that fight COVID-19 through vaccine development, treatment and diagnostics. Then, on the same day as the latest NSF Dear Colleague Letter, they announced an additional €37.5 million in funding.

€3 million of this funding has already been allocated to the Exscalate4CoV (E4C) program in Italy – one of the hardest-hit countries. E4C is operating through Exscalate, a supercomputing platform that uses a chemical library of over 500 billion molecules to conduct pathogen research.

Specifically, E4C is aiming to identify candidate molecules for drugs, help design a biochemical and cellular screening test, identify key genomic regions in COVID-19 and more.

Beyond E4C, the EU also highlighted “on-demand, large-scale virtual screening” of potential drugs and antibodies at the HPC Centre of Excellence for Computational Biomolecular Research, as well as “prioritized and immediate access” to supercomputers operated by the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking.

Presumably, as the NSF and European Commission funding opportunities are leveraged, high-performance computing will play an increasingly large role in the fight against the coronavirus.



Post by Jai Krishna Ponnappan

AI app can listen to your cough & detect COVID-19



EPFL researchers have developed an artificial intelligence-based system that can listen to your cough and indicate whether you have COVID-19.
With the new Coughvid app, developed by five researchers at EPFL's Embedded Systems Laboratory (ESL), you can record your cough on a smartphone and find out whether you might have COVID-19. So how can a smartphone app detect the new coronavirus? "According to the World Health Organization, 67.7% of people who have the virus present with a dry cough—producing no mucus—as opposed to the wet cough typical of a cold or allergy," says David Atienza, a professor at EPFL's School of Engineering who is also the head of ESL and a member of the Coughvid development team. The app is still being developed and will be released in the next few weeks.

Free and anonymous

Once the app is available, users will simply need to install it and record their cough—the results will appear immediately. "We wanted to develop a reliable, easy-to-use system that could be deployed for large-scale testing," says Atienza. "It's an alternative to conventional tests." In addition to being easy to use, the app has the advantage of being non-invasive, free and anonymous. "The app has a 70% accuracy rate," he adds. "That said, people who think they may have the disease should still go see their doctor. Coughvid is not a substitute for a medical exam."

Using artificial intelligence to help patients

Coughvid uses artificial intelligence to distinguish between different types of coughs based on their sound. "The idea is not new. Doctors already listen to their patients' coughs to diagnose whooping cough, asthma and pneumonia," says Atienza.
Right now his team is collecting as much data as possible to train the app to distinguish between the coughs of people with COVID-19, healthy people, and people with other kinds of respiratory ailments. "We'll release the app once we've accumulated enough data. It could take a few more weeks," says Atienza. In the meantime, COVID-19 patients who would like to contribute to the development work can record their cough at https://coughvid.epfl.ch/ or on the Coughvid mobile app.



COVID-19 High Performance Computing Consortium



The COVID-19 High Performance Computing Consortium Bringing together the Federal government, industry, and academic leaders to provide access to the world’s most powerful high-performance computing resources in support of COVID-19 research. Over 402 petaflops, 105,334 nodes, 3,539,044 CPU cores, 41,286 GPUs, and counting.






The world's leading medical researchers are rushing to find a treatment for COVID-19 with the help of the most powerful and advanced supercomputers in the world.
Researchers aross the globe are submitting potential treatments and cures to the COVID-19 High Performance Computing Consortium.
The consortium, using a network of supercomputers and laboratotires, can run through simulations to narrow down or rule out drug compounds to use in a cure much faster than traditional methods.
"It's a means by which one can begin to analyze tremendously complex or large problems," says Vice President of Technical Computing at IBM Cognitive Systems Dave Turek. "Pharmaceutical companies may have billions of compounds that could be potential drugs."
Any researcher can submit proposals to the consortium for the supercomputes to run through.
"So, there are very novel techniques, specifically using A.I. on these supercomputers that are beginnign to speculate about new kinds of molecules that could be created to treat COVID-19," says Turek.

The COVID-19 High Performance Computing Consortium is a unique private-public effort spearheaded by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, the U.S. Department of Energy and IBM to bring together federal government, industry, and academic leaders who are volunteering free compute time and resources on their world-class machines.


Consortium partners include:

  • Industry
    • IBM
    • Amazon Web Services
    • AMD
    • Google Cloud
    • Hewlett Packard Enterprise
    • Microsoft
    • NVIDIA
  • Academia
    • Massachusetts Institute of Technology
    • Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
    • University of Illinois
    • University of Texas at Austin
    • University of California - San Diego
    • Carnegie Mellon University
    • University of Pittsburgh
    • Indiana University
    • University of Wisconsin-Madison
  • Department of Energy National Laboratories
    • Argonne National Laboratory
    • Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
    • Los Alamos National Laboratory
    • Oak Ridge National Laboratory
    • National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center
    • Sandia National Laboratories
  • Federal Agencies
    • National Science Foundation
      • XSEDE
      • Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC)
      • Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC)
      • San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC)
      • National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA)
      • Indiana University Pervasive Technology Institute (IUPTI)
      • Open Science Grid (OSG)
      • National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR)
    • NASA
Researchers are invited to submit COVID-19 related research proposals to the consortium via this online portal, which will then be reviewed for matching with computing resources from one of the partner institutions. An expert panel comprised of top scientists and computing researchers will work with proposers to assess the public health benefit of the work, with emphasis on projects that can ensure rapid results.
Fighting COVID-19 will require extensive research in areas like bioinformatics, epidemiology, and molecular modeling to understand the threat we’re facing and form strategies to address it. This work demands a massive amount of computational capacity. The COVID-19 High Performance Computing Consortium helps aggregate computing capabilities from the world's most powerful and advanced computers to help COVID-19 researchers execute complex computational research programs to help fight the virus.
About the Consortium, the HPC Systems & How to Join
Consortium members manage a range of computing capabilities that span from small clusters to some of the largest supercomputers in the world. As a member, you would support this crucial work by not only offering your computational resources, but also your deep technical capabilities and expertise to help COVID-19 researchers execute complex computational research programs. We hope that you will join us in this crucial mission.
We are currently providing broad access to portions of over 30 supercomputing systems, representing over over 402 petaflops, 105,334 nodes, 3,539,044 CPU cores, 41,286 GPUs, and counting. Their basic specifications are described below. Additional resources will be added as our consortium grows; please check back for updates.