Jameel Clinic AI faculty lead Regina Barzilay named one of 10 very important people behind Boston’s AI revolution
Regina Barzilay, AI faculty lead at the MIT Jameel Clinic has been named one of the ten important humans behind Boston's AI revolution. Regina turned her personal experience with cancer into a mission to use AI machine learning systems to develop predictive modelling tools that can inform patients whether or not they may develop cancer, up to six years in advance. In 2020 she developed Mirai, an AI model that can detect breast cancer and in 2023 she developed Sybil, also an AI tool that can detect lung cancer risk. Both tools represent major advances in early cancer detection, treatment and mitigation, and in 2020, Regina's work on Mirai was awarded a USD 1 million prize by AAAI's Squirrel AI Award for Artificial Intelligence for the Benefit of Humanity.
Both Mirai and Sybil are being deployed to hospital members of the Jameel Clinic Hospital Network. Established in 2018, the network provides free access to an array of cutting-edge AI tools to empower healthcare systems by accelerating the mainstream usage of AI tools on a global scale. Tools to assess prostate cancer and pancreatic cancer risk are in ongoing development by MIT Jameel Clinic researchers.
Could AI make cancer a relic of the past? With Barzilay at the controls, it just might. The MacArthur Fellow turned a personal experience with cancer into an AI-aided mission that is already bearing remarkable results: Focusing her machine-learning systems on oncology, Barzilay has developed predictive modeling tools that, with high probability, tell patients whether they may develop breast or lung cancer up to six years in advance of its development, greatly aiding early detection, treatment, and mitigation.