Tyler O'Neal, Staff Editor HEALTH

Canada's Ecole de Technologie Superieure welcomes two research chairs specialized in artificial intelligence applied to health

1.5 million in funding over three years from the Fonds de recherche du Québec - Santé (FRSQ)

Thanks to $1.5 million in funding over three years from the Fonds de recherche du Quebec - Sante (FRQS), the Ecole de Technologie Superieure (ETS) will host two new research chairs on the artificial intelligence applied to the health field. Eric Granger, professor in the Department of Systems Engineering, and Rita Noumeir, professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering, will hold these two research chairs, which they will co-direct with their colleagues at the Universite de Montreal and Concordia University.

This chair program, which draws on the expertise of the two co-chairs in complementary fields, aims to train qualified personnel who will be able to work in a field combining artificial intelligence and health.

Research chair on the development and validation of clinical decision support systems using artificial intelligence

The work, which will be co-directed by Professor Rita Noumeir of ETS and Professor Philippe Jouvet of the Universite de Montreal and the CHU Sainte-Justine Research Centre, will help healthcare professionals and managers make decisions more quickly in a healthcare context.

As such, intensive care units are an ideal setting for personalized medicine research because they collect a large amount of patient data*, and this data is collected at a high frequency. In addition, this data can be linked to observations, notes, and summaries of medical procedures that are recorded in the patient's electronic record. In short, this data contains a large mass of integrated, amalgamated, and analyzed information that could improve care through the development of algorithms and methods based on artificial intelligence.

On the other hand, the diversity of formats in which this data is presented--be it through laboratory tests, physiological signals, radiological images or medical notes--and the absence of imprecision of some other data requires the development of new methods of data processing to support decision-making in healthcare.

The two co-chairs and their team will seek to address these issues. Ultimately, they plan to create a powerful algorithm that will not only allow for real-time assessment of patient status and distress but also reduce ICU readmission rates and better manage the patient flow between care units.

*This data collection will be supervised by an ethics committee and patients will be asked to consent to its use for research purposes. Rita Noumeir, professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering, ETS

Research chair in artificial intelligence and digital health for health behavior change

How can we help people follow a treatment plan or adopt healthier habits when they use an online health service without human intervention? This is the question that Eric Granger, professor of engineering at ETS, and Simon Bacon, professor of behavioral psychology at Concordia University and researcher at the CIUSSS du Nord-de-l'Ile-de-Montreal Research Centre, will attempt to answer.

Studies have shown that a person's ambivalence--the tug-of-war between their desire to change and their reasons for not doing so--has an impact on their ability to adopt healthier behaviors. Yet, non-verbal expressions provide subtle clues to a person's ambivalence, and these are not taken into account during an online intervention because there is no human being to interpret them.

That could change thanks to the research of Professor Granger, a data scientist. The professor and his team plan to develop new AI technologies that can interpret the non-verbal language of users of these services. By detecting their ambivalence and even distress or motivation, the service would tailor its interventions to be personalized to the user's emotional state. Eric Granger, professor in the Department of Systems Engineering, ETS

Until then, a large amount of multimodal data extracted from videos must first be analyzed. Using specialized deep learning models, it will be possible to accurately assign an emotional state to a combination of data from various sources (e.g., images and sounds) that include, for example, facial expression, voice intonation, gestures, or posture. It will also be necessary to improve the performance of deep neural networks in expression recognition because although they perform well in several types of applications, they tend to degrade due to the small amount of data and the diversity of sources.

The outcome of this research will lead to interventions that will have an impact on changing health behaviors, including physical inactivity and unhealthy diet, which account for up to 80% of the risk of chronic non-communicable diseases.

"ETS is the only university to have been awarded two research chairs under this program, which initially planned to fund only one for all of Quebec. This double award demonstrates that our researchers have acquired very specific expertise in data science. Their scientific contribution will undoubtedly strengthen the international influence of this strategic pole. ETS is also about engineering for a healthier future," said Francois Gagnon, Director General of ETS.

"The funding we received will be almost entirely in the form of scholarships for students who will be able to develop their expertise in the field of artificial intelligence applied to health", said Rita Noumeir, professor-researcher ETS. 

Chalmers' Nielsen builds COmputing the DYnamics of the gut microbiota for designing healthy diets

Tyler O'Neal, Staff Editor HEALTH

A new mathematical model for the interaction of bacteria in the gut could help design new probiotics and specially tailored diets to prevent diseases. The research, from Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden, was recently published in the journal PNAS.

"Intestinal bacteria have an important role to play in health and the development of diseases, and our new mathematical model could be extremely helpful in these areas," says Jens Nielsen, Professor of Systems Biology at Chalmers, who led the research.

The new paper describes how the mathematical model performed when making predictions relating to two earlier clinical studies, one involving Swedish infants, and the other adults in Finland with obesity.

The studies involved regular measurements of health indicators, which the researchers compared with the predictions made from their mathematical model - the model proved to be highly accurate in predicting multiple variables, including how a switch from liquid to solid food in the Swedish infants affected their intestinal bacterial composition.

They also measured how the obese adults' intestinal bacteria changed after a move to a more restricted diet. Again, the model's predictions proved to be reliably accurate.

"These are very encouraging results, which could enable computer-based design for a very complex system. Our model could therefore be used for creating personalized healthy diets, with the possibility to predict how adding specific bacteria as novel probiotics could impact a patient's health," says Jens Nielsen. "Intestinal bacteria have an important role to play in health and the development of diseases, and our new mathematical model could be extremely helpful in these areas," says Jens Nielsen, Professor of Systems Biology at Chalmers, who led the research. CREDIT Johan Bodell/Chalmers University of Technology

Many factors at play

There are many different things that affect how different bacteria grow and function in the intestinal system. For example, which other bacteria are already present and how they interact with each other, as well as how they interact with the host -- that is to say, us. The bacteria are also further affected by their environmental factors, such as the diet we eat.

All of these variables make predicting the effect that adding bacteria or making dietary changes will have. One must first understand how these bacteria are likely to act when they enter the intestine or how a change in diet will affect the intestinal composition. Will they be able to grow there or not? How will they interact with and possibly affect the bacteria that are already present in the gut? How do different diets affect the intestinal microbiome?

"The model we have developed is unique because it accounts for all these variables. It combines data on the individual bacteria as well as how they interact. It also includes data on how food travels through the gastrointestinal tract and affects the bacteria along the way in its calculations. The latter can be measured by examining blood samples and looking at metabolites, the end products that are formed when bacteria break down different types of food," says Jens Nielsen.

The data to build the model has been gathered from many years' worth of pre-existing clinical studies. As more data is obtained in the future, the model can be updated with new features, such as descriptions of hormonal responses to dietary intake.

A potential huge asset for future healthcare

Research on diet and the human microbiome, or intestinal bacterial composition, is a field of research that generates great interest, among both researchers and the general public. Jens Nielsen explains why:

"Changes in the bacterial composition can be associated with or signify a great number of ailments, such as obesity, diabetes, or cardiovascular diseases. It can also affect how the body responds to certain types of cancer treatments or specially developed diets."

Working with the bacterial composition, therefore, offers the potential to influence the course of diseases and overall health. This can be done through treatment with probiotics - carefully selected bacteria that are believed to contribute to improved health.

In future work, Jens Nielsen and his research group will use the model directly in clinical studies. They are already participating in a study together with Sahlgrenska University Hospital in Sweden, where older women are being treated for osteoporosis with the bacteria Lactobacillus reuteri. It has been seen that some patients respond better to treatment than others, and the new model could be used as part of the analysis to understand why this is so.

Cancer treatment with antibodies is another area where the model could be used to analyze the microbiome, helping to understand its role in why some patients respond well to immunotherapy, and some less so.

"This would be an incredible asset if our model can begin to identify bacteria that could improve the treatment of cancer patients. We believe it could really make a big difference here," says Jens Nielsen.

Kaiserslautern founding team develops software that can revolutionize semiconductor development

Tyler O'Neal, Staff Editor HEALTH

A team of engineers from Technische Universität Kaiserslautern (TUK) is developing a software tool to support companies in the semiconductor industry in agile chip design. Through early testing and verification, the solution can help customers provide feedback and correct defects early in the design process. The engineers aim to market their tool under the name "LUBIS EDA". From April 12 to 16, they will present their platform at the digital Hanover Fair at the Rhineland-Palatinate research and innovation stand.

The engineers Tobias Ludwig, Michael Schwarz, and Dr. Max Birtel have joined forces with software developer Tim Burr to bring concepts from the software domain to chip development.

"In terms of hardware design, not much has changed in the industry over the last few decades," Ludwig explains. "The focus has been on making the existing process faster. The idea of completely redesigning this with the help of agile approaches and thus making a big leap forward when it comes to achieving time-to-market has not yet taken off."
The founding team (from left to right): Tim Burr, Tobias Ludwig, Michael Schwarz and Dr. Max Birtel. Credit: Thomas Koziel/TUK
The founding team is now offering the semiconductor industry the right toolbox to unleash this untapped potential. "Our software solution enables companies to transfer proven approaches from agile software development to the world of hardware," says Ludwig. "More customer proximity, faster releases, error minimization in initial design - all of this is also possible in hardware development."

The decisive advantage lies in early and continuous testing because it takes place not at the end, but after each adaptation step. This significantly reduces the total time required to verify the chip. "Based on experience, we can guarantee at least 10 percent time savings, just in testing," says Birtel. "Since the development costs for a chip range from two to as much as six million euros per project, depending on the complexity, it's obvious what savings potential opens."

The new methodology can be introduced easily, as the development tool can be operated in parallel with existing development environments. “Chip manufacturers can use our software to convert abstract specifications into a virtual prototype that provides all the functionality, before producing the hardware," Birtel says.

The agile system can be used to achieve all development goals that are relevant in the semiconductor industry - from the smallest possible chips to the most energy-efficient to the most powerful. "Almost 15 years of development work have gone into our tool. Now we are ready for pilot projects to evaluate our software solution in specific use cases," Birtel says.

The German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy and the European Social Fund's development to market maturity was being funded until March 2021 as part of an EXIST research transfer called "Syncopate" (03EFORP026). Also, the start-up office of the TU Kaiserslautern and the Kaiserslautern University of Applied Sciences has advised the engineers.

How it all began: Ludwig further developed existing methods that enable agile hardware development as part of his doctoral thesis at the chair of Electronic Design Automation under Professor Dr. Wolfgang Kunz at TUK. Together with his doctoral colleague Schwarz, he recognized their potential, set his sights on founding the company, and brought on board Birtel, an industrial engineer who complements the technical engineer's perspective with business skills. Most recently, software developer Burr completed the team.