The combination of artificial intelligence and machine learning could someday make the treatment of health management a much more rational one.

Although Google has made significant strides in using Artificial Intelligence to fight cancer, Microsoft is not one to be left behind. The tech giant has now

unveiled its Project Hanover, which has the twin purpose of  improving our understanding of cancer and how best to treat it.

The company is in the process of developing a system which can automatically process large volumes of biomedical paper and in the process create “genome-scale” databases through which it hopes to understand which cocktail of drugs will be more effective against a given type of cancer.

To this end, it has partnered with Knight Cancer Institute and hopes to create an artificial intelligence which could customise those cocktails on a patient-to-patient basis.

Currently acute myeloid leukemia is under their intense scrutiny. Machine learning is being utilized to identify one particular strain of leukemia, which can then be targeted for diagnosis.

In another approach, computer vision is relied upon to better understand how a tumor reacts to various treatments. Although doctors can readily identify tumours, however they find it hard to say how they will mutate and have an impact on nearby cells.

In a third more ambitious approach, researchers at Microsoft aim to program the body’s cell to fight cancer and other diseases by creating a “molecular computer” which could monitor for a set of diseases and once discovered trigger an appropriate response.

Currently, many cancer treatment indiscriminately kill healthy cells alongside cancerous ones.

This video will shed further light on Microsoft’s initiative.