Utah doctors using artificial intelligence to identify rare genetic diseases in babies

While many babies are born without issues on a daily basis, there are quite a few who are born early and with some complications. Those babies end up in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU), which is where Dr. Sabrina Malone Jenkins works. The Neonatologist at University of Utah Health and Intermountain Primary Children's Hospital said, "A lot of the time we don't know what the underlying condition is and there is a wide variety of causes and rarely are any of them the same." Researchers say on a global scale about seven million infants are born with serious genetic disorders each year and it can be tough for doctors to treat them if they're not sure what's wrong. Dr. Mark Yandell, a Professor in the Department of Human Genetics at the University of Utah said, "It's estimated that about 20% of the newborns in a high-intensity newborn intensive care unit have some form of genetic disease."