The ancient Greek philosopher and polymath Aristotle once concluded that the human heart is tri-chambered and that it was the single most important organ in the entire body, governing motion, sensation, and thought.
Today, we know that the human heart actually has four chambers and that the brain largely controls motion, sensation, and thought. But Aristotle was correct in observing that the heart is a vital organ, pumping blood to the rest of the body to reach other vital organs. When a life-threatening condition like heart failure strikes, the heart gradually loses the ability to supply other organs with enough blood and nutrients that enables them to function.
Researchers from MIT and Harvard Medical School recently published an open-access paper in Nature Communications Medicine, introducing a noninvasive deep learning approach that analyzes electrocardiogram (ECG) signals to accurately predict a patient’s risk of developing heart failure. In a clinical trial, the model showed results with accuracy comparable to gold-standard but more-invasive procedures, giving hope to those at risk of heart failure. The condition has recently seen a sharp increase in mortality, particularly among young adults, likely due to the growing prevalence of obesity and diabetes. Learn more
In recent years, lung cancer rates have been rising in nonsmokers, a troubling trend for the world's #1 deadliest cancer. Sybil is a deep learning model built by MIT Jameel Clinic and Mass General Brigham researchers that accurately predicts lung cancer risk up to 6 years in advance by analyzing a patient's LDCT scan.
How exactly does this state-of-the-art model work and what was the key insight that brought it to life? Watch this 7-minute video featuring the researchers behind the model to learn more about how Sybil is transforming the future of lung cancer screening. Learn more
Despite their impressive capabilities, large language models are far from perfect. These artificial intelligence models sometimes “hallucinate” by generating incorrect or unsupported information in response to a query.
Due to this hallucination problem, an LLM’s responses are often verified by human fact-checkers, especially if a model is deployed in a high-stakes setting like health care or finance. However, validation processes typically require people to read through long documents cited by the model, a task so onerous and error-prone it may prevent some users from deploying generative AI models in the first place.
To help human validators, MIT researchers created a user-friendly system that enables people to verify an LLM’s responses much more quickly. With this tool, called SymGen, an LLM generates responses with citations that point directly to the place in a source document, such as a given cell in a database. Learn more
Organizations are increasingly utilizing machine-learning models to allocate scarce resources or opportunities. For instance, such models can help companies screen resumes to choose job interview candidates or aid hospitals in ranking kidney transplant patients based on their likelihood of survival.
When deploying a model, users typically strive to ensure its predictions are fair by reducing bias. This often involves techniques like adjusting the features a model uses to make decisions or calibrating the scores it generates.
However, researchers from MIT and Northeastern University argue that these fairness methods are not sufficient to address structural injustices and inherent uncertainties. In a new paper, they show how randomizing a model’s decisions in a structured way can improve fairness in certain situations. Learn more
