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SUMMARY:AI in Healthcare: Understanding Superbugs. - Dr Nicole Wheeler\, S
 anger Institute.
DTSTART:20180607T180000Z
DTEND:20180607T200000Z
UID:TALK106447@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Dr Sobia Hamid
DESCRIPTION:Infectious disease differs from other human diseases in its po
 tential for unpredictable and explosive spread. With a changing climate an
 d increasing globalisation\, the recognition and prevention of infectious 
 outbreaks is becoming a major concern for health authorities. Antibiotic r
 esistant infections are an increasing concern\, with the WHO estimating th
 at the rate of fatal multi-drug resistant bacterial infections could incre
 ase to 10 million by 2050\, and one of the first cases of a death due to a
  bacterial infection that was resistant to all available antibiotics occur
 ring early last year. The prevention of outbreaks of infectious disease re
 lies on early warning\, as failure to detect an emerging superbug before i
 t has become widely dispersed makes effective elimination by clinical inte
 rvention more difficult.\n\nAs the cost of genome sequencing decreases\, a
 nd sequencing technologies become more portable\, the option of monitoring
  infectious diseases using DNA sequencing becomes more realistic. This imp
 rovement in technologies has allowed the development of a large number of 
 surveillance programs which collect bacteria from patients in clinics arou
 nd the world and sequence their genomes. These efforts allow us to underst
 and which bacteria commonly infect us\, how often infection results in dis
 ease\, and whether there are any features in the DNA of these bacteria tha
 t allow us to predict which bacteria will be especially problematic for th
 e patient.\n\nDr Nicole Wheeler will talk about her work using machine lea
 rning to facilitate and improve this approach. She will present an algorit
 hm she has developed to detect Salmonella that are more likely to cause bl
 oodstream infections rather than food poisoning\, illustrating how the mod
 el works and what this teaches us about this disease. She will also outlin
 e a new project which aims to detect antibiotic resistant superbugs in the
  clinic\, focussing on the methodological advances that need to be made in
  the field in order to develop a reliable method that will generalise well
  into the future.\n\nSpeaker:\nDr Nicole Wheeler is a postdoctoral fellow 
 at the Sanger Institute. She specialises in using bioinformatics and machi
 ne learning to identify patterns of patterns of mutations in bacterial DNA
  associated with the ability to cause severe disease.
LOCATION:For venue details\, please register at www.meetup.com/Data-Insigh
 ts-Cambridge/
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