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Monash University and Alfred Hospital are developing an AI-based system to improve the way superbugs are diagnosed, treated and prevented.
According to Monash University digital health professor Christopher Bain, superbug infections kill 700,000 people each year and by 2050 the world could see 10 million deaths annually from previously treatable diseases.
Superbugs are created when microbes evolve to become immune to the effects of antimicrobials.
The project, which will be based primarily at The Alfred, has received AU $ 3.4 million from the federal government’s Medical Research Future Fund.
According to project lead researcher Antony Peleg, the project will seek to integrate genomics, electronic health data and artificial intelligence technologies to address antimicrobial resistance in the health system. Specifically, it will leverage tens of thousands of data points per patient and infect pathogens to help predict treatment responses and patient outcomes.
“This project will push the boundaries of what can be achieved in the healthcare sector and how new technologies can be applied to understand how superbugs infect humans and how they are transmitted within a hospital system,” he said. called Peleg.
See Also: Monash University Researchers Develop AI to Improve Suicide Prevention
In addition to providing early detection of antimicrobial resistance, the two organizations also hope the system will be able to create personalized treatment for patients and prevent outbreaks.
Elsewhere in the Australian healthcare sector, AustCyber has provided AU $ 500,000 in funding to cybersecurity startup Haventec to develop a new healthcare consensus system.
The system, called eConsent for Genomics, is intended to improve the way healthcare professionals, service providers and patients securely store and consent to personal health information.
Funding will come from the AustCyber Projects Fund, an Australian $ 15 million three-year federal government initiative designed to help the Australian cybersecurity industry grow both locally and globally.
Construction of the system is expected to cost approximately A $ 1 million, while Haventec and consortium partner 23Strands will provide the remaining A $ 500,000.
According to Haventec, the development of eConsent for Genomics comes at a critical time as current models for storing personal health information are constantly failing and the healthcare industry regularly tops the list of notifiable data breaches.
In collaboration with 23Strands, Haventec will also use the new consent system in a research project focused on COVID-19 patients. The research will seek to correlate negative and positive health outcomes to specific DNA profiles, which will hopefully improve predictions of how individuals will react if they become infected with COVID-19.
Monash Uni publishes the ethical analysis of agri-robots
Monash University also released a report on Monday focusing on the ethical and political issues underlying the use of robots in agriculture.
The report was created as the authors, Monash University philosophy professor Robert Sparrow and philosophy researcher Dr Mark Howard, said little attention has been paid to the ethical and political challenges surrounding increasingly automated agriculture.
“People weren’t thinking or talking, like unintended consequences, or what might happen in life and when things don’t work out perfectly,” Sparrow told ZDNet.
Currently, the Australian agricultural sector accounts for around 2.5% of the country’s workforce.
By undertaking a literature review on agricultural robot applications to answer these questions, the report found that robots could help farmers address challenges such as climate change, soil depletion, biodiversity loss, scarcity of agriculture. water and population growth by improving yield and productivity.
The physically intense work associated with farm work could also see the development of robots for activities such as weeding, fruit and vegetable harvesting, food handling and packaging activities, which could increase productivity and the amount of products sent to market, the authors said.
Sparrow noted that technologies such as fruit-picking robots could also be developed in the next decade, which could have big implications for seasonal employment.
See also: Australian report on agtech confirms that technology can lead to a fertile future
“Although the adoption of robots in agriculture has not yet been widespread due to the lack of technological breakthroughs, it is expected that there will be a gradual emergence of technologies for precision agriculture, as well as the use of automation in processing and food packaging, ”Sparrow said.
However, they also said that the widespread adoption of robots in agriculture could have negative consequences, such as mismanagement of chemicals and soil compaction due to heavy robots, and exacerbation of potential food waste if consumers do expect standardized or “perfect” products.
The pair added that greater use of robots could lead to greater standardization of livestock farming and genetically engineered created crops, so that crops are better suited for robots. There is also fear that smaller or struggling farms may lose technology and be unable to keep up, leading to a centralization of ownership in agriculture, Sparrow said.
“In order to reduce the risk of robots further centralizing ownership in the agricultural sector and further encouraging monoculture at the expense of biodiversity, governments and researchers could prioritize the development of sophisticated robots that are flexible enough to allow their use on small estates and with a wider range of crops and livestock, “the report said.
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