The US Department of Veteran Affairs is using Artificial Intelligence to supercharge its healthcare services

By Lulu Chang Published December 13, 2016

The veteran health care system has seen its fair share of criticism over the last several years, but a new tech-forward partnership may help officials grant returning warriors the care they need. On Tuesday, Flow Health announced the formation of a five-year partnership with the United States Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) for the purposes of building a “medical knowledge graph with deep learning to inform medical decision-making and train artificial intelligence to personalize care plans.”

The goal of the new collaboration will be to better understand the common problems that may put individuals at risk to certain diseases, thereby helping to identify effective treatments as well as possible side effects. The ambitious undertaking will involve “large volumes of data,” Flow Health said, and will also require the extensive study of gene variants in order “to identify disease risk, to make more precise diagnoses, and to suggest individualized treatments.”

Recommended Videos

“Our mission is to advance healthcare by applying the latest artificial intelligence techniques to improve the detection, diagnosis, treatment, and management of diseases,” said Alex Meshkin, CEO of Flow Health. “The VA supports millions of Americans who have served our nation and deserve our honor, respect and the best care our country has to offer. Through our partnership with the VA, Flow Health is working to unleash the power of AI to benefit our nation’s veterans.”

Ultimately, this partnership will result in the world’s most extensive knowledge graph of medicine and genomics based on VA records comprised of 22 million veterans over the course of the last two decades.

“Developing artificial intelligence which can automatically identify the best diagnostic and treatment pathways will assist clinicians in delivering precision medicine to every veteran,” said Dr. Robert Rowley, chief medical officer at Flow Health. “To build artificial intelligence you need huge amounts of data to feed deep learning models. This is why this partnership between the VA and Flow Health is a watershed moment for deep learning in health care.”

Former Contributor

Fascinated by the effects of technology on human interaction, Lulu believes that if her parents can use your new app…

Topics

Emerging Tech

Your future AR glasses might finally stop making the real world look weird

Researchers have developed a new display technique that keeps virtual objects realistic without dimming the real world.

Samsung AR Glasses

One of the biggest promises of augmented reality is blending digital objects seamlessly into the real world. Ironically, today's AR glasses often make the real world harder to see. Researchers at the Shibaura Institute of Technology (SIT) in Japan, led by Assistant Professor Xiaodan Hu in collaboration with Dr. Yan Zhang and Professor Xubo Yang from Shanghai Jiao Tong University in China, and Professor Kiyoshi Kiyokawa from Japan's Nara Institute of Science and Technology, have developed a new AR display technique that aims to make virtual objects look realistic without reducing visibility of the real world. The study was published in IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics.

The biggest AR problem isn't virtual objects; it's everything around them

Emerging Tech

Anti-surveillance clothing is getting cheaper, but don’t expect an invisibility cloak

Affordable shirts now claim to confuse facial recognition, although their protection depends heavily on the camera and software watching you

Chart, Plot, Adult

Anti-surveillance clothing is starting to look less like an art-school experiment and more like something you could actually wear outside. Shirts designed to confuse facial recognition systems now cost about as much as ordinary streetwear, although buying one won’t make you disappear.

The Guardian reports that designers are using face-like prints, unusual cuts and infrared lights to interfere with computer vision. These techniques target specific weaknesses, so their success depends on what happens to be watching you.

Emerging Tech

This spinning drone hides in plain sight using a visual illusion

This drone doesn't turn invisible. It tricks your brain into thinking it has.

Phantom Twist

For decades, engineers have chased the dream of an invisible drone. The usual approaches have involved transparent materials, camouflage coatings, or complex optical systems that bend light around an object. Researchers at Northwestern University decided to take a completely different route. Instead of hiding the drone itself, they chose to fool the human eye.

The result is Phantom Twist, an experimental drone that spins so rapidly it almost disappears into the background. It's not technically invisible, but to anyone watching, it looks more like a faint blur than a flying machine.