Using Avatars to Understand Adverse Drug Reactions

POSTED BY: ROBERT CHARETTE / TER, MARO

06, 2012

A few years ago, I wrote about some pioneering work

done on creating a Google Earth for the Body by Andre
Elisseeff and a research team atIBMs Zurich Research
Lab. The idea was to create a means of visualizing a
persons electronic health record (EHR) using a threedimensional image of the human-body. Over the past
few years, the approach has been used successfully at
Thy-Mors Hospital in northern Denmark, and is slowly
rolling out to other hospitals in Denmark as well as in
Switzerland.
Elisseeff and some of his co-workers spun off a company
called Nhumi (new-me) Technologies in 2009 to explore
additional ways of using 3-dimensional views of the
human-body, aka 3D avatars, to easily manage and
visualize clinical data. A short while ago Elisseeff
contacted me about their most recent work involving drug
safety events. Nhumi modified their previously developed
avatar modeling technology so that hundreds or
thousands of medical historiesin this case, all the events
reported to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration 's
(FDA) Adverse Event Reporting System (AERS) since
2004could be visualized directly on the human body,
allowing a person to see a heat map of the body parts
that are most adversely affected by a particular drug.
You can go to Nhumi drug safety web site (beta) and
type in a drug or an ingredient and see which parts of the
body have been reportedly affected by it, along with
supporting information. For instance, there are different
medical-condition filters you can apply to as well as a
"workbench" to explore drug safety data. There is also
prescription information from the FDA so that visitors can
check the efficacy or the reason a drug is prescribed.
You can watch a short video on how the site
workshere.The approach may look like too much
information, but Elisseeff and his team wanted to make
sure visitors have access to all available data about a
particular drug. Says Elisseeff:
"One can easily be fooled by drug safety data and it is
important to be specific about who reported what and
when. A drug given to an older population can appear
less safe than another drug simply because elderly are
more subject to adverse reactions than younger people,
not because it is inherently more risky. Cause-effect
relationships are complex to detect and can only be
analyzed with tools that let the visitors compare and
explore the influence of different factors."

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Currently, the site is meant more for medical and

pharmacological experts or very informed patient who
can properly interpret the results (and the risks depicted)
than for the general populace. After typing in a few
common ingredients or drugs (e.g., acetaminophen,
ibuprofen, amoxicillin or vioxx) and seeing what they
possibly can do to your body, you might be tempted to
swear off all drugs forever. One has to remember that the
data depicted are adverse effects, and are not balanced
out against a drugs positive effects (which would be nice
to
see
as
well).
For now, the information depicted is an aggregate, but in
the future a user may be able to call up individual FDA
reports of adverse reactions to look at them in detail,
Elisseeff told me. Nhumi is also contemplating the
depiction of the negative effects of drug interactions as
an
additional
feature.
There are two other companies that have also recently
set up web systems to report FDA AERS data, Adverse
Events and Clarimed (the latter is much broader and
reports on adverse medical device information, hospital
ratings, etc.), but neither use avatars. You can read
more about them in this Wall Street Journal story.
Nhumis use of 3D avatars is one of the several ways
visualization is being used in the medical field. For
example, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute is using what it
calls virtual patients to study how radiation interacts
with the human body, while theFDAs Center for Devices
and Radiological Health has created a virtual family of
adults and children in order to study how best to implant
medical devices in children, such as heart defibrillators,
this
other WSJ article
reports.
Nhumi is working on several different efforts to help
access and depict medical data in addition to the adverse
drug work, such as a quick way for clinicians and
radiologists to access patient images and scans and then
directly show them over a virtual model of the human
anatomy. Elisseeff also recently told me that he received
a short demo of IBMs Watson and his team is now
thinking about how Watson and the companys 3D
avatars could be linked up in the medical arena.
Probably the biggest problem for Nhumi is maintaining its
focus: there are so many opportunities for using avatars
in the medical and pharmaceutical fields that it is easy to
start pursuing the proverbial white rabbit. However, I
think it is only a matter of time before everyone has their
own medical 3D avatar, and I would be surprised if
Nhumi (along with IBM) is not one of the leaders in the
area.
Photo: Courtesy of Nhumi Technologies

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