BCIG SPEAKER EVENT: “Can Intelligent Systems Replace Invasive Medical Procedures? Early Insights with the Liver and Prostate i-biopsy Concept”

ABSTRACT: An important challenge of the Information Era in medicine is to replace invasive, painful procedures with non-invasive techniques for diagnosis. We investigated the possibility of a knowledge discovery in data approach, based on computational intelligence tools, to integrate information from various data sources - imaging data, clinical and laboratory data - to predict with acceptable accuracy the results of the liver and prostate biopsy. The resulted intelligent systems, tested on 700 patients with chronic hepatitis C and B, and on 393 patients with prostate cancer, based on C5.0 decision trees and boosting, predict with an accuracy reaching even 100% the fibrosis stage results of the liver biopsy, according to two largely accepted fibrosis scoring systems, Metavir and Ishak, with and without liver stiffness (FibroScan®), the grade of necroinflammation (activity) prediction, according to Ishak NI scoring systems, and the Gleason score of prostate biopsy. We also introduced the concepts of intelligent virtual biopsy or i-biopsy and that of i-scores. In chronic hepatitis C and B, which can progress to cirrhosis and liver cancer, Interferon is the only effective treatment, for carefully selected patients, but it is very expensive. Some of the selection criteria are based on liver biopsy, an invasive, costly and painful medical procedure. Developing an efficient selection system, based on noninvasive medical procedures, could be in the patients benefit and also save money. We investigated the possibility of building an intelligent system to assist the interferon therapeutic decision, replacing real biopsy with i-biopsy. To our best knowledge i-biopsy outperformed all similar systems published in the literature and offer a realistic opportunity to replace liver biopsy in many important medical contexts.

3:30 - 5:00 pm November 13, 2008

Alexandru G. Floares, M.D., Ph.D.

Alexandru Floares is a medical doctor - neurologist - having a Ph.D. degree in biophysics, a M.Sc. degree in management, and four years of studies in applied mathematics. He is the head and founder of the Artificial Intelligence Department of the Oncological Institute Cluj-Napoca, Transilvania, Romania, and the president and founder of SAIA - Solutions of Artificial Intelligence Applications - organization, Cluj-Napoca, Transilvania. He was a neurological practitioner, also involved in various interdisciplinary medical researches, until 2000. Due to his background, his present research is more problems than methods oriented, trying to identify important biomedical problem and to solve them with various computational intelligence tools. He coordinates various scientific research projects exploring biological networks - gene regulatory networks (GRN), brain neural networks and circuits, metabolic and signalling pathways, tumour vascular networks - and intelligent medical decision support systems for diagnosis, prognosis, optimization and individualization of therapeutic strategies. He introduced the concept of drug gene regulatory networks (DGRN), a generalization of gene regulatory networks in a pharmacogenomic context, and of i-biopsy or intelligent virtual biopsy and the related intelligent scoring systems. Dr. Floares has published over 40 peer-reviewed papers biomedical applications of artificial intelligence. He is a member of the IEEE, of the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society, of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society, of the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM), and of the SIGART, SIGSIM, SIGKDD, and SIGEV of ACM, of BCIG, and of the IBM Academic Initiative program. He was chairman of special sessions concerning biomedical applications of computational intelligence at IJCNN 2007, WCCI 2008, CIBB 2008, etc. He served on the international committees for CIBB05, PRIB05, CIBB06, PRIB06, CIBB07, and PRIB07, WCCI 2008, CIBB 2008, HEALTHINF 2009, etc. He is the recipient of the Honorary Doctor title of The Yorker International University. His biography is mentioned in collections like Who's Who in the World, Who's Who in Science and Engineering, Great Minds of the 21st Century, etc.

Alexandru George Floares
SAIA - Solutions of Artificial Intelligence Applications,
Str. Vlahuta, Bloc Lama C, Ap. 45, Cluj-Napoca, 400310, Romania, saia4ai@yahoo.com

 Artificial Intelligence Dept, Oncological Institute Cluj-Napoca,
Str. Republicii Nr. 34-36, Cluj-Napoca, 400015, Romania alexandru.floares@gmail.com

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