Where will precision medicine go in 2017?

In President Obama’s 2015 State of the Union address, he launched the Precision Medicine initiative, which aims to revolutionize health outcomes by giving clinicians tools to better understand the complex mechanisms underlying a patient’s health, disease or condition, and to better predict which treatments will be most effective.

Up until now, most medical treatments were designed with a one-size-fits-all approach which can be successful for some, but not for others. President Obama’s Precision Medicine Initiative proposes that, by recognizing that individuals vary in their genetic makeup and that responses to medications differ as a result, we can make smarter treatment plans for each patient. Now, a year later, debate is still ongoing as to whether this approach to treating disease can truly deliver on its promise of revolutionizing healthcare and improving outcomes.

While the future of the Precision Medicine Initiative is uncertain as we enter into a new presidential term, how can we as clinicians implement tenets of precision medicine right now when treating our patients?

First and foremost, one tenet of more precise care is enabling our patients to access their own health record data so they can review it when they need to and share it with others when they want. The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs has made a huge push for patient access to health records through its pioneering “Blue Button.”

Source: Where will precision medicine go in 2017?

 

It’s official: A brand-new human organ has been classified

“In the paper, which has been peer reviewed and assessed, we are now saying we have an organ in the body which hasn’t been acknowledged as such to date,” said J Calvin Coffey, a researcher from the University Hospital Limerick in Ireland, who first discovered that the mesentery was an organ.

Source: It’s official: A brand-new human organ has been classified – ScienceAlert

 

CS 294 Deep Reinforcement Learning, Spring 2017

Table of Contents


Prerequisites

This course will assume some familiarity with reinforcement learning, numerical optimization and machine learning. Students who are not familiar with the concepts below are encouraged to brush up using the references provided right below this list. We’ll review this material in class, but it will be rather cursory.

  • Reinforcement learning and MDPs
    • Definition of MDPs
    • Exact algorithms: policy and value iteration
    • Search algorithms
  • Numerical Optimization
    • gradient descent, stochastic gradient descent
    • backpropagation algorithm
  • Machine Learning
    • Classification and regression problems: what loss functions are used, how to fit linear and nonlinear models
    • Training/test error, overfitting.

For introductory material on RL and MDPs, see

For introductory material on machine learning and neural networks, see

Source: CS 294 Deep Reinforcement Learning, Spring 2017

 

Forget Survival of the Fittest: It Is Kindness That Counts

A psychologist probes how altruism, Darwinism and neurobiology mean that we can succeed by not being cutthroat.

Why do people do good things? Is kindness hard-wired into the brain, or does this tendency arise via experience? Or is goodness some combination of nature and nurture?

Dacher Keltner, director of the Berkeley Social Interaction Laboratory, investigates these questions from multiple angles, and often generates results that are both surprising and challenging. In his new book, Born to Be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life, Keltner weaves together scientific findings with personal narrative to uncover the innate power of human emotion to connect people with each other, which he argues is the path to living the good life. Keltner was kind enough to take some time out to discuss altruism, Darwinism, neurobiology and practical applications of his findings with David DiSalvo.

DISALVO: You have a book that was just released called Born to Be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life. What in a nutshell does the term “born to be good” mean to you, and what are you hoping people learn from reading the book?

KELTNER: “Born to be good” for me means that our mammalian and hominid evolution have crafted a species—us—with remarkable tendencies toward kindness, play, generosity, reverence and self-sacrifice, which are vital to the classic tasks of evolution—survival, gene replication and smooth functioning groups. These tendencies are felt in the wonderful realm of emotion—emotions such as compassion, gratitude, awe, embarrassment and mirth. These emotions were of interest to Darwin, and Darwin-inspired studies have revealed that our capacity for caring, for play, for reverence and modesty are built into our brains, bodies, genes and social practices. My hopes for potential readers are numerous. I hope they learn about the remarkable wisdom of Darwin and the wonders of the study of emotion. I hope they come to look at human nature in a new light, one that is more hopeful and sanguine. I hope they may see the profoundly cooperative nature of much of our daily social living.

DISALVO: You’ve said that one of the inspirations for your work was Charles Darwin’s insights into human goodness. Because most people equate his name with “survival of the fittest,” it’ll probably be surprising to many that Darwin focused on goodness at all. What were a few of your take aways from Darwin’s work that really inspired you?

KELTNER: What an important question. We so often assume both in the scientific community, and in our culture at large, that Darwin thought humans were violent and competitive and self-interested in their natural state. That is a misrepresentation of what Darwin actually believed, and where the evolutionary study of human goodness is going.

Source: Forget Survival of the Fittest: It Is Kindness That Counts – Scientific American