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AIMI-IBIIS Seminar: Solving Fundamental Cancer Problems with Artificial Intelligence - Amber Simpson, PhD

Event Details:

Wednesday, February 17, 2021
12:00pm - 1:00pm PST

Email aimicenter@stanford.edu for a link to join

Open to the Stanford community only

Abstract:
Precision medicine is an approach to patient care that considers individual differences in a patient’s genetic and molecular makeup to predict disease progression and optimize treatment response – and one of the greatest opportunities, and challenges, in modern cancer care. There is currently no known method to predict the metastatic potential of any cancer at early stages. We propose to address this critical barrier by creating a cancer digital twin, a digital replica of a cancer patient using state-of-the-art artificial intelligence (AI) techniques applied to 900,000 abdominal CT scans from a high-volume cancer center. Predicting metastatic progression at early stages would radically transform our approach to cancer treatment, but promises substantial implications for patients and society that must be considered. For example, would you want to know a dismal prognosis predicted by your digital twin? How would you act on this information – would you regard the choice as yours, or your fate as given by your twin? In a world where AI is increasingly biased, how do we ensure that AI doesn’t create further inequities? Dr. Simpson will present new work on the development of a cancer twin for predicting metastatic progression as well as provide some discussion of the social ramifications of such technology.

About:
Amber Simpson is the Canada Research Chair in Biomedical Computing and Informatics, and Associate Professor jointly appointed in the Department of Biomedical and Molecular Sciences and School of Computing at Queen’s University. She is an Affiliate of the Vector Institute for AI as well as a Senior Investigator at the Canadian Cancer Trials Group. She received her PhD in Computer Science from Queen’s and was a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Vanderbilt University. Recently recruited from a faculty position at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York, she holds research funding from the National Institutes of Health as well funding from all three Canadian research councils (Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, and Canadian Institutes of Health Research). Dr. Simpson is an American Association of Cancer Research and Pancreatic Cancer Action Network award holder and a charter member of NIH study section, which recognizes her innovations in biomedical research. Dr. Simpson is the new director of the Human Mobility Research Centre, a centre that will be expanded to focus on health data innovations.

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