Microsoft is upping its game in the race to develop technology that benefits the health sector and increase the quality of preventive healthcare.
The tech giant is now in the process of creating a system to detect diseases when they are just beginning to develop, thus allowing healthcare practitioners to stop the sickness in its tracks – this increases the chances of a patient making a successful and full recovery.
Following the announcement of a new partnership of Microsoft with Adaptive Biotechnologies, the company will work towards an in-depth study of the human immune system to allow diseases to be detected more effectively. The company also plans to expand the size of the team responsible for the project.
Since being formed in 2009, Adaptive Biotechnologies has focused on learning how the body responds to ailments by mapping the immune system. The company is also known to have formed close ties with Fred Hutch, a company in which the CEO of Microsoft, Satya Nadella, is a fellow board trustee.
According to Chad Robins, CEO of Adaptive Biotechnologies, the AI expertise of Microsoft will be incorporated into developing maps of the immune system, and to identify the diseases the body has previously overcome, and what specific illness it is fighting at the time. This involves the sequencing of T-cell and B-cell receptors within the human body’s natural defence system. The results of the study will allow the developers to create a blood test to alert healthcare practitioners when patients’ bodies are currently fighting certain ailments. The final goal is to develop a universal blood test capable of detecting any illness that the immune system is fighting at the time. In the future, possibly hundreds of various diseases could be detected prior to their symptoms taking effect.
According to Microsoft’s corporate vice president of AI and research, Peter Lee, the immune system of the body has its own effective machine-learning functionalities. The project’s vision expands on the human body’s natural capability of detecting possible danger towards an individual’s health, then flagging the threats, followed by keeping the genetic codes used to fight the same ailment in the future. By coupling this with Microsoft’s artificial intelligence algorithms, this immune system tracking project is set to provide considerable benefits to the health and wellness industry.
In recent years, the application of AI in the healthcare sector has increased greatly as the benefits of AI become more apparent. This new Microsoft immune system mapping project, which is focused on applying machine learning and AI technology to improve the health sector, is part of Microsoft’s Healthcare NExT initiative.
Based on the multiple health projects in the pipeline, Microsoft has shown inspiring commitment towards benefiting the health and wellbeing of mankind via cutting-edge technology that tackles the most difficult aspects of disease control and management.
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