Accurate disease risk prediction based on genomic and clinical data can lead to more effective disease screening, early prevention, and personalized treatment strategies. However, despite the identifications of hundreds of disease-associated genomic and molecular features for many disease traits through genome-wide studies in the past two decades, drug resistance often causes the targeted therapies to fail in cancer patients, which is largely due to tumor heterogeneity (Zhang et al., 2022). For advanced cancers, tumor heterogeneity encompasses both the malignant cells and their microenvironment, which makes it challenging to develop accurate prediction models for personalized treatment strategies that account for intratumor heterogeneity. Single-cell technologies provide an unprecedented opportunity for dissecting the interplay between the cancer cells and the associated tumor microenvironment (TME), and the produced high-dimensional omics data should also augment existing survival modeling approaches for identifying tumor cell type-specific genes predictive of cancer patient survival.

Background: Clinical natural language processing (NLP) refers to the use of computational methods for extracting, processing, and analyzing unstructured clinical text data, and holds a huge potential to transform healthcare in various clinical tasks. Objective: The study aims to perform a systematic review to comprehensively assess and analyze the state-of-the-art NLP methods for the mainland Scandinavian clinical text. Method: A literature search was conducted in various online databases including PubMed, ScienceDirect, Google Scholar, ACM digital library, and IEEE Xplore between December 2022 and February 2024. Further, relevant references to the included articles were also used to solidify our search. The final pool includes articles that conducted clinical NLP in the mainland Scandinavian languages and were published in English between 2010 and 2024. Results: Out of the 113 articles, 18% (n=21) focus on Norwegian clinical text, 64% (n=72) on Swedish, 10% (n=11) on Danish, and 8% (n=9) focus on more than one language. Generally, the review identified positive developments across the region despite some observable gaps and disparities between the languages. There are substantial disparities in the level of adoption of transformer-based models. In essential tasks such as de-identification, there is significantly less research activity focusing on Norwegian and Danish compared to Swedish text. Further, the review identified a low level of sharing resources such as data, experimentation code, pre-trained models, and rate of adaptation and transfer learning in the region. Conclusion: The review presented a comprehensive assessment of the state-of-the-art Clinical NLP for electronic health records (EHR) text in mainland Scandinavian languages and, highlighted the potential barriers and challenges that hinder the rapid advancement of the field in the region.

Artificial intelligence could have the capability to pinpoint cancer diagnoses a lot sooner. A new study published in the journal Radiology last week noted that AI helped predict one-third of breast cancer cases up to two years prior to diagnosis. The research surveyed imaging data and screening information from BreastScreen Norway exams performed from January 2004 to December 2019. Women who were later diagnosed with breast cancer based on these exams were given an AI risk score by a "commercially available AI system," according to the study's findings. The scores were ranked 1-7 for low-risk malignancy, 8-9 for intermediate risk and 10 for high-risk malignancy.

State-of-the-art automatic sleep staging methods have already demonstrated comparable reliability and superior time efficiency to manual sleep staging. However, fully automatic black-box solutions are difficult to adapt into clinical workflow and the interaction between explainable automatic methods and the work of sleep technologists remains underexplored and inadequately conceptualized. Thus, we propose a human-in-the-loop concept for sleep analysis, presenting an automatic sleep staging model (aSAGA), that performs effectively with both clinical polysomnographic recordings and home sleep studies. To validate the model, extensive testing was conducted, employing a preclinical validation approach with three retrospective datasets; open-access, clinical, and research-driven. Furthermore, we validate the utilization of uncertainty mapping to identify ambiguous regions, conceptualized as gray areas, in automatic sleep analysis that warrants manual re-evaluation. The results demonstrate that the automatic sleep analysis achieved a comparable level of agreement with manual analysis across different sleep recording types. Moreover, validation of the gray area concept revealed its potential to enhance sleep staging accuracy and identify areas in the recordings where sleep technologists struggle to reach a consensus. In conclusion, this study introduces and validates a concept from explainable artificial intelligence into sleep medicine and provides the basis for integrating human-in-the-loop automatic sleep staging into clinical workflows, aiming to reduce black-box criticism and the burden associated with manual sleep staging.

AZoRobotics speaks with Alice Ruixue Ai from the University of Oslo about her efforts to create an artificial intelligence (AI)-based virtual screening algorithm and a cross-species Alzheimer's disease (AD) drug verification system. This system could help provide a fast, cost-effective and highly accurate method for the identification of potent mitophagy inducers to maintain brain health. Alzheimer's Disease (AD) is the most common form of dementia, seen mainly in the elderly. Around 50 million people in the world suffer from dementia, and about 70% of those people have AD, so this is a huge problem for society. It is estimated that managing the health and social costs for people with AD will cost about 2 trillion dollars by the year 2030.

We present a novel benchmark and associated evaluation metrics for assessing the performance of text anonymization methods. Text anonymization, defined as the task of editing a text document to prevent the disclosure of personal information, currently suffers from a shortage of privacy-oriented annotated text resources, making it difficult to properly evaluate the level of privacy protection offered by various anonymization methods. This paper presents TAB (Text Anonymization Benchmark), a new, open-source annotated corpus developed to address this shortage. The corpus comprises 1,268 English-language court cases from the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) enriched with comprehensive annotations about the personal information appearing in each document, including their semantic category, identifier type, confidential attributes, and co-reference relations. Compared to previous work, the TAB corpus is designed to go beyond traditional de-identification (which is limited to the detection of predefined semantic categories), and explicitly marks which text spans ought to be masked in order to conceal the identity of the person to be protected. Along with presenting the corpus and its annotation layers, we also propose a set of evaluation metrics that are specifically tailored towards measuring the performance of text anonymization, both in terms of privacy protection and utility preservation. We illustrate the use of the benchmark and the proposed metrics by assessing the empirical performance of several baseline text anonymization models. The full corpus along with its privacy-oriented annotation guidelines, evaluation scripts and baseline models are available on: https://github.com/NorskRegnesentral/text-anonymisation-benchmark

Artificial intelligence and the cell's self-cleansing system are the keys behind the novel medication. The treatment may strengthen other organs as well. One in six Norwegians over 80 is affected by Alzheimer's disease. Numbers are even higher worldwide, and there is still no cure available. Researchers at the faculty have developed an artificial intelligence (AI) method to help them identify potential new medicines for Alzheimer's.

Artificial Intelligence is providing astonishing results, with medicine being one of its favourite playgrounds. In a few decades, computers may be capable of formulating diagnoses and choosing the correct treatment, while robots may perform surgical operations, and conversational agents could interact with patients as virtual coaches. Machine Learning and, in particular, Deep Neural Networks are behind this revolution. In this scenario, important decisions will be controlled by standalone machines that have learned predictive models from provided data. Among the most challenging targets of interest in medicine are cancer diagnosis and therapies but, to start this revolution, software tools need to be adapted to cover the new requirements. In this sense, learning tools are becoming a commodity in Python and Matlab libraries, just to name two, but to exploit all their possibilities, it is essential to fully understand how models are interpreted and which models are more interpretable than others. In this survey, we analyse current machine learning models, frameworks, databases and other related tools as applied to medicine - specifically, to cancer research - and we discuss their interpretability, performance and the necessary input data. From the evidence available, ANN, LR and SVM have been observed to be the preferred models. Besides, CNNs, supported by the rapid development of GPUs and tensor-oriented programming libraries, are gaining in importance. However, the interpretability of results by doctors is rarely considered which is a factor that needs to be improved. We therefore consider this study to be a timely contribution to the issue.

Sentiment analysis benefits from large, hand-annotated resources in order to train and test machine learning models, which are often data hungry. While some languages, e.g., English, have a vast arrayof these resources, most under-resourced languages do not, especially for fine-grained sentiment tasks, such as aspect-level or targeted sentiment analysis. To improve this situation, we propose a cross-lingual approach to sentiment analysis that is applicable to under-resourced languages and takes into account target-level information. This model incorporates sentiment information into bilingual distributional representations, byjointly optimizing them for semantics and sentiment, showing state-of-the-art performance at sentence-level when combined with machine translation. The adaptation to targeted sentiment analysis on multiple domains shows that our model outperforms other projection-based bilingual embedding methods on binary targetedsentiment tasks. Our analysis on ten languages demonstrates that the amount of unlabeled monolingual data has surprisingly little effect on the sentiment results. As expected, the choice of a annotated source language for projection to a target leads to better results for source-target language pairs which are similar. Therefore, our results suggest that more efforts should be spent on the creation of resources for less similar languages tothose which are resource-rich already. Finally, a domain mismatch leads to a decreased performance. This suggests resources in any language should ideally cover varieties of domains.