Column
Columns by Dr. Taeho Jo on AI in medicine
AI in Medicine: From Nobel Discoveries to Clinical Frontiers
Four-part series in the IU School of Medicine Research Updates blog, May to August 2025
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AI Innovation Through the Lens of the 2024 Nobel Prizes
This column traces the history from the XOR problem through multi-layer perceptrons to modern deep learning, highlighting John Hopfield's Hopfield Network and Geoffrey Hinton's Boltzmann Machine as foundational contributions that earned the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics.
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The Protein Folding Problem: The Day AI Unlocked a Secret of Life
This column uses a balloon-sculpting analogy to explain protein folding and its link to diseases like Alzheimer's and Parkinson's. It traces the CASP competition history, from David Baker's 2014 success to AlphaFold's breakthrough using CNNs, and then AlphaFold2's decisive victory using the Evoformer module, a Transformer variant.
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AI in Medicine: What Is Your 'Aha' Moment?
This column explores transformative "aha" moments in AI development, including the discovery of backpropagation, the 2020 scaling laws paper, and AlphaFold's breakthrough. It discusses Model Context Protocol enabling AI agent collaboration and identifies three irreplaceable human capacities: crafting narratives, formulating meaningful questions, and demonstrating authentic human connection.
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From Folding Proteins to Unfolding Memories: An AI Journey Through Alzheimer's
This column ties the series together, covering FDA-approved Alzheimer's treatments (lecanemab and donanemab), the challenge of early detection, and three AI-driven detection strategies: brain imaging analysis with CNNs, genomic analysis with the DeepBlock transformer tool, and metabolomic analysis with the c-SWAT tool.
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