AJMC

April 4, 2024

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It is important that physicians raise awareness around the condition of generalized pustular psoriasis (GPP) in order to close the current diagnostic gap, says Joseph Zabinski, PhD, MEM, managing director of artificial intelligence (AI) and personalized medicine at OM1.

Transcript

How is AI being used to identify patients with GPP?

GPP—generalized pustular psoriasis—is a rare, very serious dermatologic condition. I’ve seen literature that says more than half of patients with GPP are misdiagnosed into another condition before they receive the correct diagnosis of GPP. And until recently, there hasn’t really been good treatment options for them; now there is.

The thing that we’ve tackled in our work, between OM1 and collaboration with AAD [American Academy of Dermatology] and sponsored by BI [Boehringer Ingelheim] has been to use artificial intelligence to say, of patients that we know with GPP, what do those patients share in their real-world data? So, in their diagnoses, medications they’ve taken, providers they’ve seen; all those data points. What do they share prior to their GPP diagnosis that’s common to those patients, but that distinguishes them from everybody else?

AI is very good at understanding and recognizing those kinds of patterns and those similarities among patients. And once that’s done, if everything works well, an AI system like our PhenOM system is able to use that sort of digital fingerprint to then look at new patients; to look at others in large datasets, in an electronic health record or health system and say, “Are there other patients whose data records match this known phenotypic fingerprint, but who don’t have this GPP diagnosis?” Because if that’s the case, we can highlight that person to say this is someone who probably warrants a second look by a specialist to see if they have this condition. I can report happily that we’ve completed the work of figuring out if this is analytically possible. It is; it works quite well. I’m excited to see what this work will do [in] raising awareness around this condition in the dermatology community as well as in practice, helping to highlight these patients and close that diagnostic gap.