MILTON a computer algorithm has been developed to investigate patient test results commonly collected by GPs to detect patterns in the data and forecast with high confidence a disease diagnosis many years later. The artificial intelligence tool has been developed by AstraZeneca and it will fast-track the development of more effective and targeted treatments. The data is available to other researchers at will who could develop diagnostic tests that allow early preventative treatment to stop diseases in their tracks.
Slave Petrovski in a press release issued told Sky News: “For many of these diseases, by the time the individual visits the doctor because of an illness or visible observation that is far down the line from when the disease process began and before the disease became symptomatic the blood has witnessed many events. The symptoms in an individual that are highly predictive of developing diseases like Alzheimer’s, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), kidney disease and many others can be identified easily.
The data which MILTON examined was collected from 67 routine clinical biomarkers, including comprehensive results from blood and urine tests, checks on blood pressure and respiratory performance, as well as weight, age and sex. Data was also used from UK Biobank which has a vast repository of health information. Further data was also scrutinized from 50,000 Biobank volunteers on 3,000 proteins found in blood plasma that play an important part in many body functions, including the immune and hormonal systems.
MITON was successful in identifying subtle patterns in the data that would have been invisible to the human eye, and link them to diseases the patients were diagnosed with up to a decade or more later. The cumulative performance of the tool was given a rating as exceptional for 121 diseases and highly predictive for another 1,091.
Dr Petrovski quoted further “There is always the opportunity to combine lifestyle with (pharmaceutical) interventions to get the optimum benefits of health.” He further added that often when we look at diseases it is in the later stages, they are difficult to reverse.
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