A new innovative tool that can be used to predict the effects of immunotherapy on patients suffering from lung cancer is under development at Shaare Zedek Medical Center, the Jerusalem hospital announced Tuesday. The AI (artificial intelligence)-based technology, named I3LUNG, will make use of machine and deep learning to analyze a wide variety of patient information in order to formulate a treatment plan that is suited to the specific medical situation of every patient. The development of the new innovation is funded by the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation funding program, which Israel joined in 2021. Shaare Zedek was chosen to become the first and only Israeli hospital to receive such a grant. The goal, the medical center says, is to create a new tool to enhance the decision-making of medical staff and patients during the treatment of lung cancer.

A recent "fake news" scandal involving IT giant DeNA Co. shows how quickly bogus health information can make the rounds online. According to a 300-page report released last month by a third-party panel looking into the scandal, Welq -- one of the firm's 10 content curation sites and one that focused on health -- totally lacked the awareness that medical information should be handled carefully because inaccuracies can do serious harm to people's health. Instead, Welq worked hard to find an algorithm it could use to mass-produce articles that would dominate Google's search rankings. The site managers also naively believed that, in an era when the most rigorously researched and reported works of journalism struggle to sell, they could strike it rich as long as they kept readers attracted to the site, regardless of accuracy. As a result, some of the stories ended up looking like a bad joke, like the one that said ghosts might cause stiff shoulders.