SEASON 3, EPISODE 13 - Andre Esteva, PhD - Personalizing Treatment Decisions through Artificial Intelligence

Today we are discussing how treatment decisions can be personalized through artificial intelligence and digital pathology. Our guest is Andre Esteva of Artera. Atera’s first product is in prostate cancer. We discuss how AI can improve upon the current state of the practice which largely relies on making decisions based on clinical nomograms. We discuss the concepts prediction and prognosis and how both are incorporated into treatment decisions; what goes into developing and validating AI based algorithms in digital pathology and the importance of validating these algorithms in the appropriate studies specifically randomized clinical trials. There is one huge advantage of AI based digital pathology tools over genomics and molecular tools. Image based tools can be performed instantaneously rather than waiting days to weeks. Andre Esteva is a researcher and entrepreneur in medical artificial intelligence. He currently serves as CEO of Artera and was previously Head of Medical AI at Salesforce Research. He has worked at Google Research, Sandia National Labs, GE Healthcare, and has founded four companies. His research efforts have largely focused on medical AI diagnostics and precision medicine. His publications have made the covers of Nature and Nature Medicine, and have been featured in Cell, The Lancet, NeurIPS, and similar venues. These works have been widely covered by the WSJ, Fortune, BBC, The Economist, and hundreds of other news outlets.