Voice as a Biomarker of Health
Vardit Ravitsky et ses collègues ont obtenu une importante subvention pour une projet consistant à recueillir des échantillons de voix humaines dans le but de constituer une base de données qui pourrait aider les médecins à détecter certaines maladies ou conditions telles que la pneumonie, l’Alzheimer ou l’autisme. Elle nous en parle dans UdeM Nouvelles:
« Artificial intelligence may soon help doctors diagnose and treat diseases, including cancer and depression, based on the sound of a patient’s voice, as 12 leading research institutions – including Université de Montréal – work to establish voice as a biomarker to be used in clinical care.
With $14-million U.S. in funding over four years from the U.S. National Institutes of Health, the project is being led by Dr. Yael Bensoussan of the University of South Florida and Olivier Elemento of Weil Cornell Medicine in New York City, along with six other institutions in the U.S. and four in Canada.
This is one of several projects funded by a new NIH Common Fund program called Bridge to Artificial Intelligence (Bridge2AI). French-American AI biotech startup Owkin is supplying the technology for the database.
Called Voice as a Biomarker of Health, the project aims to ethically collect hundreds of thousands of human voices while ensuring diversity and patients’ privacy. Machine learning models will then be trained to spot diseases by detecting changes in the human voice, at low cost.
We asked the project’s sole Quebec principal investigator, Vardit Ravitsky, a bioethics professor in UdeM’s School of Public Health and a senior lecturer on Global Health and Social Medicine at the Harvard Medical School, to tell us more. »
