Applied AI: eHealth & the human genome

At the recent TED conference, Riccardo Sabatini, spoke about the amazing potential from our recent understanding of the entire human genome.

He wheeled 175 huge books with over 260 thousand pages, each  filled with A, G, T and Cs, containing the entire DNA of Craig Venter.

Predicting (and preventing) health issues. He turned the page and read a sequence of 8 letters that represent Craig Venter’s eye color – blue.

And then he turned to another page, where if just two letters were in the wrong order, it would mean he has cystic fibrosis.

Predicting physical attributes from DNA

Using machine learning, he is now able to predict things like height, eye color, skin color, and even facial structure based on a person’s genome. Pretty amazing.

The application areas for this are massive, with the right prediction models (and later simulation models) we are going to be able to be able to not only predict but prevent many major health issues.