In 1945 the volume of human knowledge doubled every 25 years. Now, that number is 12 hours [1]. With our collective computational power rapidly increasing, vast amounts of data and our ability to assimilate it, has seeded unprecedented fertile ground for innovation. Healthtech companies are rapidly sprouting from data ridden soil at exponential rates. Cell free DNA companies, once a rarity, are becoming ubiquitous. The genomics landscape, once dominated by the few, are being inundated by a slew of competitors. Grandiose claims of being able to diagnose 50 different cancers from a single blood sample, or use AI to best dermatologists, radiologists, pathologists, etc., are being made at alarming rates. Accordingly, it's imperative to know how to assess these claims as fact or fiction, particularly when such claimants may employ "statistical misdirection". In this addition to "The Insider's Guide to Translational Medicine" we disarm perpetrators of statistical warfare of their greatest ...

The recent emergence of pre-trained language models and transformer architectures pushed the creation of larger and larger machine learning models. Google's BERT presented attention mechanism and transformer architecture possibilities as the "next big thing" in ML, and the numbers seem surreal. OpenAI's GPT-2 set a record by processing 1.5 billion parameters, followed by Microsoft's Turing-NLG, which processed 17 billion parameters just to see the new GPT-3 processing an astonishing 175 billion parameters. To not feel complacent, just this week Microsoft announced a new release of its DeepSpeed framework (which powers Turing-NLG), which can train a model with up to a trillion parameters. That sounds insane but it really isn't.

Skin Analytics, a U.K.-based startup that has developed a skin cancer screening service that uses artificial intelligence, has raised £4 million in Series A funding. The round was led by Hoxton Ventures, with participation from Nesta and Mustard Seed Ventures. Skin Analytics says it will use the injection of cash to expand its focus to the U.S. after it was awarded the "Breakthrough Device Designation" by the FDA, as part of a programme designed to fast track new technologies that can have significant impact on the nation's health. It will also continue forging partnerships within the U.K.'s national health service, following the launch of what it claims was the world's first "AI-powered" clinical pathway in conjunction with University Hospital Birmingham. Skin Analytics offers a CE marked medical device that studies suggests is able to identify skin cancers, pre-cancerous and benign lesions "to the same level as a dermatologist".