Implantable AI Platform Provides Early Diagnosis of Disease, Treatment Options

Implantable AI Platform Provides Early Diagnosis of Disease, Treatment Options
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Optoelectronic researchers say they have developed, for the first time, a biocompatible, implantable artificial intelligence (AI) platform that can classify, in real time, healthy and pathological patterns in biological signals such as heartbeats. The team, based at Technische Universität Dresden, Germany, add that it detects pathological changes even without medical supervision.

The research results appear in Science Advances.

“Early detection of malign patterns in patients’ biological signals can save millions of lives. Despite the steady improvement of artificial intelligence–based techniques, the practical clinical application of these methods is mostly constrained to an offline evaluation of the patients’ data. Previous studies have identified organic electrochemical devices as ideal candidates for biosignal monitoring. However, their use for pattern recognition in real time was never demonstrated,” wrote the investigators.

“Here, we produce and characterize brain-inspired networks composed of organic electrochemical transistors and use them for time-series predictions and classification tasks using the reservoir computing approach. To show their potential use for biofluid monitoring and biosignal analysis, we classify four classes of arrhythmic heartbeats with an accuracy of 88%. The results of this study introduce a previously unexplored paradigm for biocompatible computational platforms and may enable development of ultralow–power consumption hardware-based artificial neural networks capable of interacting with body fluids and biological tissues.”

In this work, the team demonstrated an approach for real-time classification of healthy and diseased bio-signals based on a biocompatible AI chip. They used polymer-based fiber networks that structurally resemble the human brain and enable the neuromorphic AI principle of reservoir computing. The random arrangement of polymer fibers forms a so-called “recurrent network,” which allows it to process data, analogous to the human brain.

The nonlinearity of these networks enables to amplify even the smallest signal changes, which—in the case of the heartbeat, for example—are often difficult for doctors to evaluate. However, the nonlinear transformation using the polymer network makes this possible without any problems.

In trials, the AI was able to differentiate between healthy heartbeats from three common arrhythmias with an 88% accuracy rate. In the process, the polymer network consumed less energy than a pacemaker. The potential applications for implantable AI systems are manifold. For example, they could be used to monitor cardiac arrhythmias or complications after surgery and report them to both doctors and patients via smartphone, allowing for swift medical assistance.

“The vision of combining modern electronics with biology has come a long way in recent years with the development of so-called organic mixed conductors,” explained Matteo Cucchi, a PhD student and first author of the paper. “So far, however, successes have been limited to simple electronic components such as individual synapses or sensors. Solving complex tasks has not been possible so far.

“In our research, we have now taken a crucial step toward realizing this vision. By harnessing the power of neuromorphic computing, such as reservoir computing used here, we have succeeded in not only solving complex classification tasks in real time, but we will also potentially be able to do this within the human body. This approach will make it possible to develop further intelligent systems in the future that can help save human lives.”