A trend has emerged of evidently softhearted ransomware gangs swearing off hospitals during the COVID crisis.

North of the border, two grants of $200,000 are on offer for researchers innovating transformative ways to apply AI in healthcare—and they’re only one part of an ambitious academic endeavor to expand medical AI.

The COVID crisis has pushed healthcare providers to up their game on digital health, but the sector is not moving fast enough on this front for the liking of healthcare consumers.

More than 105 exhibitors presented AI-specific wares in the virtual AI showcase. That was down from 2019’s pre-COVID 150 but still easily beat 2018’s head count, around 75.

Drawing on nothing more than Facebook activity, psychiatric AI can distinguish individuals headed for hospitalization with schizophrenia from those with worsening mood disorders such as clinical depression and bipolar states. 

A women’s health technology company has received the FDA’s blessing to market deep learning-based software designed to help breast radiologists spot hard-to-find nascent cancers in 3D mammograms.

Both outcomes and costs may vary widely from one patient to the next even in hospitals with consistently strong quality scores. Machine learning can help optimize the selection process for each patient as an individual.

Only two of 156 scientific papers on AI published over the past 12 years used emotion as input data, according to a new literature review. And the reviewers focused on a specialty ripe for augmentation by artificial emotional intelligence: pregnancy health.