Artificial Intelligence is making predictive medicine a reality, managing and analyzing a huge amount of data, defining correlations that individuals often cannot detect. This makes possible to shift from the traditional logic of medical research based on longitudinal retrospective data to a new predictive and comparative logic, which makes practitioners and researchers able to use massive amount of data organized according to a comparative logic.
Predictive medicine is based on genetic, molecular, and clinic information or data to predict, early diagnostic, and prevent specific diseases identifying patients who could benefit from advanced personalized therapeutics. Several are the national initiatives and AI-based solutions intended to predict especially rare or chronical diseases. Some Italian hospitals have recently implemented different AI-based systems to detect patients at risk, taking a step forward the predictive personalized medicine.
AGENAS (The National Agency for Regional Health Services) is developing an AI-based service for physicians based on a machine learning tool able to interact with the National EHR to detect patients who need for being monitored and/or treated, according to diagnostic results, clinical history, and genetic information.
The Gaslini pediatric hospital, located in Genoa, is contributing to the EU initiative 1+ Million Genomes (1+MG), intended at creating an advanced technological infrastructure able to offer a safe, secure, and ethical access to medical data to better inform the European health policies.
More concretely, since 2020 a national project has advanced the predictive medicine thanks to an AI algorithm able to detect the early symptoms of infections and especially of the Covid-19. This makes possible to detect who will develop the most severe form of this pathology analyzing and correlating clinical parameters, diagnostic images, and patients genetical profile. This solution has been designed, realized, and implemented by the Experimental Imaging Center of S. Raffaele hospital (Milan) in partnership with Microsoft, NVIDIA, and the Omics Center of the same hospital. The project has been publicly funded by the Lombardia Region.
All these projects and solutions as well as the others involving national health-related players are in line with the guidelines defined and shared by the AGID (Agency for Digital Italy) and the Department for Digital Transformation of the national government in the “Italian Strategy for the Artificial Intelligence 2024-2026”, which in healthcare aims at promoting the shift towards a predictive medicine, based on an early diagnosis, a personalized care protocol, the respect of medical compliance, and the real-time monitoring to avoid errors.
