Results from a new peer-reviewed study show people develop emotional bonds with artificial intelligence (AI) therapy chatbots in a similar way to in-person therapists. The study evaluated 1,205 people using a mental health app developed by Wysa Ltd. to assist symptoms of anxiety or depression. The chatbot guides users through therapy exercises including cognitive-behavioral techniques (CBT), dialectical behavior therapy, meditation, breathing and yoga to build mental resilience skills.

The National Health Research Institutes (NHRI) of Taiwan has teamed up with Taiwanese computer manufacturer Asustek Computer Inc. and American cloud computing company Nvidia Corp. to build Taiwan’s first supercomputer for medical research.

There has been some skepticism about the value of electronic health records (EHRs) beyond their role as a source of income for EHR developers, but an April 3 presentation at the 2022 America College of Cardiology scientific sessions being held in Washington suggests this type of software offers some real value for heart failure patients. Tariq Ahmad of Yale School of Medicine said a study of EHRs suggests their power lay in part in prompting compliance with heart failure medication regimes, an application of this type of software that can both save lives and cut costs for the Medicare program and Medicare beneficiaries.

TORONTO – Hyperfine Inc. has received Health Canada approval for the first FDA-cleared portable magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) device, which also features advanced reconstruction deep learning software. The company simultaneously announced its commercial launch of the Swoop imaging system in Canada.

TORONTO – Health Gauge Inc. (HG) and AI-on-Call Inc. will soon deploy a digital remote patient monitoring solution for early prediction of sepsis at three seniors' facilities located in British Columbia. HG’s smartwatch and AI-driven cloud platform capture an array of vital signs data, including blood pressure, heart and respiratory rates, and will be supported by AI-on-Call software that alerts medical staff to early signs of sepsis and acute illness.

The U.K. government has doubled down on its overarching strategy for artificial intelligence (AI) with a 10-year plan to sustain the nation’s place in the global AI race. One of the key considerations in this plan is to revisit the criteria for status as an inventor, a clear nod to the dilemma presented by proponents of allowing the DABUS algorithm to be named as an inventor.

The FDA granted de novo marketing authorization for Paige Prostate, artificial intelligence (AI)-driven software that improves detection of prostate cancer. The clinical study submitted to the FDA demonstrated that using Paige Prostate resulted in a 7% improvement in sensitivity in correctly diagnosing cancer, increasing from 89.5% to 96.8%.

The question of whether an artificial intelligence (AI) algorithm can be an inventor has been making the rounds in the past couple of years, and the question came up again in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia. Stephen Thaler, who developed the Device for the Autonomous Bootstrapping of Unified Sentience (DABUS) algorithm that has been credited with two inventions, failed to persuade the court that an algorithm qualifies as an “individual,” and thus patents must still be assigned to humans, at least where the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office is concerned.

PARIS – Researchers from the department of radiation oncology at the European Hospital Georges Pompidou (HEGP) and Stanford University School of Medicine have together developed a new artificial intelligence (AI) prediction tool for patients diagnosed with prostate cancer. These researchers have just published a validation of this interpretable AI model in Cancers. “It’s a question of distinguishing patients at risk of mortality from aggressive cancer that is spreading rapidly, from patients who might have far less aggressive cancer and who are not likely to die from it in under 10, 15 or even 20 years,” Jean-Emmanuel Bibault, radiotherapy oncologist at HEGP, told BioWorld.

The World Health Organization’s (WHO) guidance for ethics and governance for artificial intelligence (AI) in health discusses several issues regarding regulation, including the question of transparency for the algorithm’s source code. The WHO paper is not prescriptive on this and several other issues, however, raising the prospect that regulatory entities will not be discouraged from adopting policies that run afoul of intellectual property concerns and thus impede advances in AI.