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Artificial Intellegence Helped Save A Boy's Life

Matthew Might created an algorithim to help doctors come up with an emergency treatment that saved his son Bertrand's life. He is photograhed here at home with his wife, Cristina, and with Bertrand, age 11.
Courtesy UAB
Matthew Might created an algorithim to help doctors come up with an emergency treatment that saved his son Bertrand's life. He is photograhed here at home with his wife, Cristina, and with Bertrand, age 11.

An artificial intelligence developer races against time to create a computer program that can save his son from the mysterious illness that seems to be killing him.

It sounds like the premise for a science fiction novel. But it’s a true story.

We talk to Matthew Might, director of the Hugh Kaul Precision Medicine Institute at University of Alabama, Birmingham. His son, Buddy, has a rare genetic disease. This past May, he became extremely ill and Might put an experimental algorithm into action to come up with possible causes and treatments.  It’s a story that hints at how artificial intelligence could transform medical care.

 

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Elsa Partan is a producer and newscaster with CAI. She first came to the station in 2002 as an intern and fell in love with radio. She is a graduate of Bryn Mawr College and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. From 2006 to 2009, she covered the state of Wyoming for the NPR member station Wyoming Public Media in Laramie. She was a newspaper reporter at The Mashpee Enterprise from 2010 to 2013. She lives in Falmouth with her husband and two daughters.