Going to space to find the cure for cancer  

Space cancer is a leading threat to astronauts. Now, a way to prevent it could help everyone on Earth.
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In partnership with Intel

Astronauts encounter a wide range of health risks in space, and one particularly worrying risk is cancer caused by exposure to space radiation. That’s one reason why Intel is working with Frontier Development Lab, an applied artificial intelligence research accelerator, on using machine learning to determine the biological factors that make certain astronauts more or less likely to develop cancer after being exposed to cosmic rays.

A key objective of the project is pinpointing the genes that are causal for the progression of cancer. But while there exist massive troves of healthcare data that machine learning AI could sort through to reveal more information about genetic disposition to cancer, AI researchers can’t easily access that information due to understandable privacy restrictions.

So, researchers with the Frontier Development Lab had to get creative in the way they constructed their AI model. Patrick Foley, Lead Deep Learning Architect at Intel, explains more in this Freethink video.

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