If you've been putting off your flu shot until the season really gets going, wait no longer. Influenza viruses quietly circulate year-round in the US, but every winter they go big, triggering a seasonal epidemic of sniffles, sweats, and sore throats. And this year it's come earlier than usual, just in time for a potential peak over the holidays. Normally, infections start to increase around the beginning of January, peak in February, and then come down by the end of March. But according to data released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Friday, the flu is already widespread in 12 states, including California and New York.

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New England Council members General Electric (GE) and Partners HealthCare recently partnered to launch an initiative to improve medical care through artificial intelligence (AI) technology. GE engineers and developers will work with clinical and technology experts from Partners HealthCare hospitals to build software and create applications to help doctors in a variety of tasks. The two organizations hope to create software to help doctors interpret medical images and develop applications on genomics, population health, and additional areas of medicine. GE and Partners aim to build an open platform that can use hundreds of applications, but the team will start by developing software for radiology. Machine learning technology can sift through thousands of images using algorithms to identify patterns to help better diagnose and treat patients with conditions like cancers or strokes.

GE Healthcare and the corporate parent of two of Harvard University's teaching hospitals will spend the next ten years working on ways to bring artificial intelligence (AI) to every aspect of a hospital visit, the companies announced today. The Center for Clinical Data Science will include teams from both companies and will develop, test and deploy AI software at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) and Brigham and Women's Hospital, the Boston Globe reported. GE, which moved its corporate headquarters to Boston last year, is working to transform itself from an industrial company to one that develops software that powers equipment from MRI machines to jet engines, among other innovations, the article noted. AI -- sometimes called deep learning technology -- refers to computers that can sift through vast amounts of data and learn to become more accurate and efficient over time. Executives from GE, one of the nation's largest corporations, and Partners Healthcare (which owns MGH and Brigham and Women's Hospital), said integrating the technology into healthcare could help patients receive better care.

GE and Partners HealthCare are looking to revolutionize the way doctors treat patients by adding the manufacturing giant's artificial intelligence expertise to a partnership with the nonprofit hospital and physicians network over the next decade. The goal is to transform the notoriously slow-to-innovate health care industry by better analyzing the mountains of data doctors juggle in the hopes of coming up with better treatment methods and clearer diagnoses for the patients of the not-so-distant future. "We have more and more information, and the information comes at our clinicians in a way that can be unmanageable," said David Torchiana, CEO of Partners HealthCare. "In the end, this is about making health care better and making the lives of our patients better." GE and Partners, which owns Massachusetts General Hospital and Brigham and Women's Hospital, will spend the next 10 years creating artificial intelligence software that can detect how severe a stroke is and identify tumors in medical images. But more important than individual uses, officials said, will be an app store for health care AI algorithms, where hospitals can buy or sell software they've made.

General Electric's healthcare division will partner with the corporate parent of two of Harvard University's teaching hospitals to develop artificial intelligence products for medicine. The goal: to leverage the company's dominant position in medical imaging into a new ownership of medical AI. "We make machines but that's not really the business," says John Flannery, the chief executive of GE Healthcare, says he tells his team. "The business is what kind of solution can we put together that gets a better clinical and economic outcome?" GE Healthcare is one of the main manufacturers of imaging devices used in radiology–things like PET and MRI scanners.

Keen Footwear sells its iconic boots, shoes and sandals through thousands of retailers worldwide. But the Oregon manufacturer, which is working hard to honor its commitment to become "American Built," does not have the manpower to support a dedicated information security staff. With a team of six information technology professionals -- all but two focused on handling the day-to-day client issues of its 450 employees -- the IT staff would fall behind in triaging incidents the company's security software flagged. "We fit squarely in the realm that we have the problems of all the big players, but we don't have the resources of a large enterprise," said Clark Flannery, Keen's director of IT in Portland. To solve the problem, Flannery augmented his IT staff with machines.

Fintech startups looking to disrupt payday lending are using artificial intelligence to make loans with rates as low as 6% and with default rates of 7% or less. AI can make a difference on several fronts, the startups say. It can process enormous amounts of data that traditional analytics programs can't handle, including data scraped constantly off the borrower's phone. It can find patterns of creditworthiness or lack thereof on its own, without having to be told of every clue and correlation, startups like Branch.co And the cost savings of eliminating the need for loan officers lets these companies make the loans at a profit.