Lenovo’s ThinkReality A3 Smart Glasses can show up to five virtual displays

Their potential applications include 3D visualizations and AR-guided workflows for enterprise.

Mariella Moon, @mariella_moon4h ago 1Comments 158Shares Lenovo

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Lenovo has launched a new ThinkReality device for CES 2021, and the company says it’s “one of the most advanced and versatile” smart glasses for enterprise customers. The manufacturer is presenting the ThinkReality A3 as a pair of smart glasses that can be used for applications like 3D visualization and augmented reality guided workflows at a time when the world is “looking to adopt new technologies for smart collaboration.” Unlike the first ThinkReality model, the A6, which looks like your typical mixed reality headset, this one fits more like a pair of (chunky) sunglasses. Companies can modify it with Lenovo’s industrial frame options, though, to make it more durable or safer.

The ThinkReality A3 is powered by the Qualcomm Snapdragon XR1 SoC for virtual and mixed reality headsets. It can show up to five virtual 1080p displays and has an 8-megapixel camera that can provide 1080p video, as well as dual fish-eye cameras for room-scale tracking. The headset still needs to be connected to either a PC or a Motorola smartphone powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 series processor or better via USB-C to work, though.

As you’d expect, the PC edition uses Windows software tools and applications. Meanwhile, the A3 Industrial Edition relies on Motorola’s ThinkReality software platform for hands-free AR tasks. Lenovo envisions various applications for the headset across industries and believes it can be used wherever space and privacy are limited. It can be used in factories, laboratories, retail locations and hospitality spaces, for instance. Since it’s meant for enterprise use, Lenovo didn’t release a consumer price point, but it announced that the A3 will be available in select markets worldwide starting mid-2021.

Follow all of the latest news from CES 2021 right here!

Hidden Symmetry Could Be Key to Ultra-Powerful Quantum Computers

TOPICS:Molecular PhysicsQuantum ComputingQuantum Information ScienceQuantum PhysicsUniversity Of Cambridge

By UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE JANUARY 8, 2021

Researchers find that hidden symmetry could be key to more robust quantum systems.

Researchers have found a way to protect highly fragile quantum systems from noise, which could aid in the design and development of new quantum devices, such as ultra-powerful quantum computers.

The researchers, from the University of Cambridge, have shown that microscopic particles can remain intrinsically linked, or entangled, over long distances even if there are random disruptions between them. Using the mathematics of quantum theory, they discovered a simple setup where entangled particles can be prepared and stabilized even in the presence of noise by taking advantage of a previously unknown symmetry in quantum systems.

Their results, reported in the journal Physical Review Letters, open a new window into the mysterious quantum world that could revolutionize future technology by preserving quantum effects in noisy environments, which is the single biggest hurdle for developing such technology. Harnessing this capability will be at the heart of ultrafast quantum computers.

“Until we can find a way to make quantum systems more robust, their real-world applications will be limited.” — Shovan Dutta

Quantum systems are built on the peculiar behavior of particles at the atomic level and could revolutionize the way that complex calculations are performed. While a normal computer bit is an electrical switch that can be set to either one or zero, a quantum bit, or qubit, can be set to one, zero, or both at the same time. Furthermore, when two qubits are entangled, an operation on one immediately affects the other, no matter how far apart they are. This dual state is what gives a quantum computer its power. A computer built with entangled qubits instead of normal bits could perform calculations well beyond the capacities of even the most powerful supercomputers.

“However, qubits are extremely finicky things, and the tiniest bit of noise in their environment can cause their entanglement to break,” said Dr Shovan Dutta from Cambridge’s Cavendish Laboratory, the paper’s first author. “Until we can find a way to make quantum systems more robust, their real-world applications will be limited.”

Several companies – most notably, IBM and Google – have developed working quantum computers, although so far these have been limited to less than 100 qubits. They require near-total isolation from noise, and even then, have very short lifetimes of a few microseconds. Both companies have plans to develop 1000 qubit quantum computers within the next few years, although unless the stability issues are overcome, quantum computers will not reach practical use.

Now, Dutta and his co-author Professor Nigel Cooper have discovered a robust quantum system where multiple pairs of qubits remain entangled even with a lot of noise.

They modeled an atomic system in a lattice formation, where atoms strongly interact with each other, hopping from one site of the lattice to another. The authors found if noise was added in the middle of the lattice, it didn’t affect entangled particles between left and right sides. This surprising feature results from a special type of symmetry that conserves the number of such entangled pairs.

“We weren’t expecting this stabilized type of entanglement at all,” said Dutta. “We stumbled upon this hidden symmetry, which is very rare in these noisy systems.”

They showed this hidden symmetry protects the entangled pairs and allows their number to be controlled from zero to a large maximum value. Similar conclusions can be applied to a broad class of physical systems and can be realised with already existing ingredients in experimental platforms, paving the way to controllable entanglement in a noisy environment.

“Uncontrolled environmental disturbances are bad for survival of quantum effects like entanglement, but one can learn a lot by deliberately engineering specific types of disturbances and seeing how the particles respond,” said Dutta. “We’ve shown that a simple form of disturbance can actually produce – and preserve – many entangled pairs, which is a great incentive for experimental developments in this field.”

The researchers are hoping to confirm their theoretical findings with experiments within the next year.

Reference: “Long-Range Coherence and Multiple Steady States in a Lossy Qubit Array” by Shovan Dutta and Nigel R. Cooper, 9 December 2020, Physical Review Letters.
DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.125.240404

The research was funded in part by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC).

Let’s Put The Rumors To Bed: 4 Common Myths A Sleep Doctor Sees All The Time

mbg Founder & Co-CEOBy Jason Wachob

Image by Kersti Niglas / ContributorOur editors have independently chosen the products listed on this page. If you purchase something mentioned in this article, we may earn a small commission.January 8, 2021 — 10:01 AMShare on:

High-quality sleep is crucial for overall well-being. After all, a proper snooze affects so many avenues of health—from immune function to weight gain, stress, skin health, and more. And yet! There are a plethora of misconceptions about sleep running rampant in society, specifically around the notion of a “good night’s rest.” How can we expect to reap all the profound benefits of sleep if we don’t even know what “good” sleep really means? 

Clinical psychologist and board-certified sleep specialist Michael J. Breus, Ph.D., also known as “The Sleep Doctor,” is here to put the rumors to bed. On this episode of the mindbodygreen podcast, he debunks four common sleep myths and what actually increases your chances of high-quality shut-eye: 

Myth 1: Everyone needs eight hours. 

According to Breus, eight hours shouldn’t be the standard for sleep. In fact, he says there shouldn’t be a standard at all: “It’s so personalized and it’s so different for everybody,” he says. “Eight hours is not necessarily what everybody needs.” He explains that the average sleep cycle, from wake to REM, takes approximately 90 minutes, and the average human has five of these 90-minute cycles (if you do the math, that clocks out to around seven and a half hours). But that’s just the average! You may require more or less sleep than the average person, and that’s OK. 

“I’ve [seen patients] who need more sleep before they have their period and who need less sleep after they have their periods, and we adjust their bedtimes accordingly,” says Breus. Some people’s circadian rhythms change with the seasons—there are a host of factors that can affect your perfect snooze range. 

When people use eight hours as the standard for sleep, says Breus, it can cause increased anxiety for people who don’t meet the threshold. “They get in bed, and they think, ‘OK, I’ve got enough time to get my eight hours,’ and then they don’t fall asleep. And then they start to get anxious about it, which causes autonomic arousal, which makes it harder to sleep.” By smashing this eight-hour myth, you might be able to get more sleep in the long run. ADVERTISEMENT

Myth 2: You can catch up on sleep.

Here’s another misconception: Have you ever gotten a night of poor sleep, then thought, Oh well, I’ll catch up on sleep this weekend. According to Breus, it’s time to nip that notion: “It’s almost impossible to actually catch up on sleep,” he says. “The human body can only take on so much sleep in a single bout.”

In other words, your body has a limit for how much natural, healthy sleep it needs (which, again, differs for everyone). When you do cross that limit? You might feel even worse: “I don’t know about you, but I feel like absolute crap if I sleep longer in the mornings than my normal wakeup time,” Breus notes. 

That’s not to say you’re completely out of luck if you’re suffering from a couple of days of poor sleep. “The consistency of your sleep schedule is actually what gives you energy and is actually what allows you to feel better,” Breus explains. One study even found that it takes four days to recover fully from one hour of lost sleep—so it’s not so much about clocking hours as it is about reclaiming a regular schedule.

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Myth 3: If you can’t sleep, get moving. 

Another pervasive notion in the world of sleep? Rather than staring at the ceiling, you should get up and walk around. At first glance, yes, this is sound advice—experts say if you’ve been trying to fall asleep for 20 minutes with no luck, leaving your bedroom can actually help. But some people may take this counsel and run with it—literally—completing a workout in the hopes of making the body tired enough to fall asleep. 

Now, Breus says daily exercise is important for high-quality sleep, just not too close to bedtime. “Remember, in order to fall asleep, your core body temperature actually has to drop,” says Breus. So when you get your heart pumping (with a HIIT workout of some sort), your body temperature might be too high for your body to reach sleep mode. Thus, a night of tossing and turning. “Stop exercise roughly four hours before bed,” Breus notes, and you should be set. 

Myth 4: Don’t eat right before bed. 

Perhaps you’ve been warned before: Snacking before bedtime keeps you awake and energized. Again, this is an overgeneralization. Sure, you don’t want to be feasting on sugary sweets right before hitting the hay, but some light snacking isn’t so bad. Says Breus, “You don’t want to go to bed full, but you also don’t want to go to bed hungry.” 

Here’s the science: When your body runs out of fuel, your brain activates cortisol (aka, your stress hormone that sounds the alarm bells in your body and causes a spike in blood sugar). As a result, you might wake up in the middle of the night: “When I talk to [patients], I ask the timing of their last meal, and more times than not, they stop eating at like seven o’clock at night. If you take the time from seven at night until two in the morning, that’s seven and a half hours. They’re out of fuel.”

That’s why Breus says if you constantly wake up in the middle of the night, a bedtime snack might not be such a bad idea. “There’s nothing wrong with having a 200- to 250-calorie snack about 30 minutes before bed,” he notes. Of course, be sure to make it balanced—Breus recommends a light snack with about 70% whole carbs and 30% either fat or protein for a perfect nibble.

The takeaway. 

Sleep is a precious thing. That’s why it’s important to cut through all the noise and focus on what high-quality sleep truly means for you. The perfect night’s rest looks different for everyone, and Breus says it’s time to start challenging what you might view as standard sleep etiquette.

Scientists develop new gene therapy strategy to delay aging

by Zhang Nannan, Chinese Academy of Sciences

Cellular senescence, a state of permanent growth arrest, has emerged as a hallmark and fundamental driver of organismal aging. It is regulated by both genetic and epigenetic factors. Despite a few previously reported aging-associated genes, the identity and roles of additional genes involved in the regulation of human cellular aging remain to be elucidated. Yet, there is a lack of systematic investigation on the intervention of these genes to treat aging and aging-related diseases.

How many aging-promoting genes are there in the human genome? What are the molecular mechanisms by which these genes regulate aging? Can gene therapy alleviate individual aging? Recently, researchers from the Chinese Academy of Sciences have shed new light on the regulation of aging.

Recently, researchers from the Institute of Zoology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), Peking University, and Beijing Institute of Genomics of CAS have collaborated to identify new human senescence-promoting genes by using a genome-wide CRISPR/Cas9 screening system and provide a new therapeutic approach for treating aging and aging-related pathologies.

In this study, the researchers conducted genome-wide CRISPR/Cas9-based screens in human premature aging stem cells and identified more than 100 candidate senescence-promoting genes. They further verified the effectiveness of inactivating each of the top 50 candidate genes in promoting cellular rejuvenation using targeted sgRNAs.

Among them, KAT7 encoding a histone acetyltransferase was identified as one of the top targets in alleviating cellular senescence. It increased in human mesenchymal precursor cells during physiological and pathological aging. KAT7 depletion attenuated cellular senescence, whereas KAT7 overexpression accelerated cellular senescence.

Mechanistically, inactivation of KAT7 decreased histone H3 lysine 14 acetylation, repressed p15^INK4b transcription, and rejuvenated senescent human stem cells.

Cumulative studies have described that age-associated accumulation of senescent cells and proinflammatory cells in tissues and organs contribute to the development and progression of aging as well as aging-related disorders. Prophylactic ablation of senescent cells mitigates tissue degeneration and extends the healthspan in mice.

In this study, the researchers found that intravenous injection of a lentiviral vector encoding Cas9/sg-KAT7 reduced the proportions of senescent cells and proinflammatory cells in the liver, diminished circulatory senescence-associated secretory phenotype (SASP) factors in the serum, and extended healthspan and lifespan of aged mice.

These results suggest that gene therapy based on single-factor inactivation may be sufficient to extend mouse lifespan. The researchers also found that the treatment with the lentiviral vector encoding Cas9/sg-KAT7 or a KAT7 inhibitor WM-3835 alleviated human hepatocyte senescence and reduced the expression of SASP genes, suggesting the possibility of applying these interventions in clinical settings.

Altogether, this study has successfully expanded the list of human senescence-promoting genes using CRISPR/Cas9 genome-wide screen and conceptually demonstrated that gene therapy based on single-factor inactivation is able to delay individual aging. This study not only deepens our understanding of aging mechanism but also provides new potential targets for aging interventions.

The study entitled “A genome-wide CRISPR-base screen identifies KAT7 as a driver of cellular senescence” was published online in Science Translational Medicine on Jan. 6, 2021.

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Explore furtherNSD2 enzyme appears to prevent cellular senescence

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More information: Wei Wang et al. A genome-wide CRISPR-based screen identifies KAT7 as a driver of cellular senescence, Science Translational Medicine (2021). DOI: 10.1126/scitranslmed.abd2655Journal information:Science Translational MedicineProvided by Chinese Academy of Sciences

Microsoft’s AI model has outperformed humans in natural language understanding

By Usama Jawad @@UsamaJawad96 · Jan 7, 2021 09:48 EST · HOT!0

Microsoft is heavily invested in artificial intelligence models with expertise in natural language understanding (NLU). To that end, the company has acquired startups studying natural language processing (NLP) and also has an exclusive license to OpenAI’s GPT-3 language model. Now, the Redmond tech giant has announced that its AI model has outperformed humans in SuperGLUE benchmarks.

SuperGLUE is considered to be a difficult benchmark as it tests a variety of NLU operations such as answering questions when given a premise, natural language inference, and co-reference resolution, among many others. To tackle this benchmark, Microsoft updated its Decoding-enhanced BERT with Disentangled Attention (DeBERTa) model, and boosted it to have a total of 48 Transformer layers with 1.5 billion parameters.

As a result, the single DeBERTa model now scores 89.9 in SuperGLUE while the ensemble model with 3.2 billion parameters scores 90.3. Both of these scores are slightly higher than the human baseline of 89.8, which means that the model performs better than humans.

It is important to note that this is not the first model to surpass human baselines. The “T5 + Meena” model developed by the Google Brain team scored 90.2 just a couple of days ago, on January 5. However, Microsoft’s DeBERTa even outperformed that model on January 6.

Moving forward, Microsoft has noted that it is integrating DeBERTa into the Microsoft Turing natural language representation model (Turing NLRv4), which means that it will then be utilized by customers across Bing, Office, Dynamics, and Azure Cognitive Services. The company says that the fact that its model uses fewer parameters than Google’s solution means that it is more energy-efficient and is more maintainable because it is easier to compress and deploy. It went on to say that:

DeBERTa surpassing human performance on SuperGLUE marks an important milestone toward general AI. Despite its promising results on SuperGLUE, the model is by no means reaching the human-level intelligence of NLU. Humans are extremely good at leveraging the knowledge learned from different tasks to solve a new task with no or little task-specific demonstration. This is referred to as compositional generalization, the ability to generalize to novel compositions (new tasks) of familiar constituents (subtasks or basic problem-solving skills). Moving forward, it is worth exploring how to make DeBERTa incorporate compositional structures in a more explicit manner, which could allow combining neural and symbolic computation of natural language similar to what humans do.

Microsoft has released the model, its documentation, and its source code for public use on GitHub here.

Facebook, Apple Lead Future Of Smart Glasses

ByPYMNTSPosted on January 7, 2021

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The connected economy will someday have glasses. Smart glasses. Nine years after Google’s misfire with the product, smart glasses are making a return in a big way — as some very big names are getting behind them.

The most anticipated development in the emerging world of connected glasses is Apple’s project, which according to reports has recently entered into its second phase of development. Little in the way of hard details are known about the project, but according to reports the glasses have been conceived as an augmented reality accessory. According to reports, the glasses will be lightweight and designed to overlay information such as text messages and maps in front of the wearer’s eyes, while users will be able to control the glasses with Siri.

They are also, according to most recent reports, still several years away from the market. Upon completing its second phase of development — mostly focused on battery design and upgrades — the project moves to the third development phase to complete a working prototype. Once that is in hand, the project then goes through a minimum  6- to 9-month period for engineering verification. All in all, according to Apple, the much-anticipated wearable, while actively under construction at present, will not be on the market until 2023 at the absolute earliest.

And with a three-year minimum delay, Apple might just find the market a bit more crowded when it finally arrives.

Facebook Soon To Release Smart Glasses 

Facebook, for example, has recently announced that its smart glasses projects are anticipated for “sooner rather than later” release in 2021.

“Augmented and virtual reality are about delivering a sense of presence — the feeling that you’re right there with another person or in another place,” Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg noted in his annual new year blog post. “Instead of having devices that take us away from the people around us, the next platform will help us be more present with each other and will help the technology get out of the way.”

Facebook Hardware Chief Andrew Bosworth notes that Facebook is not calling its soon to be released wearable “AR glasses,” as that functionality is not fully available as of yet, though they will be connected glasses. “We’re excited about it, but we don’t want to over-hype it. We’re not even calling it augmented reality; we’re just calling it ‘smart glasses.’” Bosworth said.

Some have noted that that the lack of full AR functionality falls a bit short of Facebook’s initial hopes for its foray into wearable glasses — though some experts have speculated that Facebook is being conservative in its initial announcement and that there could be more functionalities built in when the glasses are officially announced.

But while big names are moving slowly, notably, the startup scene in the glasses wearable world is incredibly active of late, and perhaps putting pressure on the larger players.

The Glasses Wearables Startup Rodeo 

While Facebook and Apple are circling the market, they are following startups currently scrambling to gain a foothold in the market. In November, GlassesUSA.com revealed its new Revel Tune Smart Audio Glasses — designed as connected by Bluetooth to smartphones so users can listen to music and take phone calls, similar in design to the Lucid Lyte design entering the market at present.

And while most of the players entering in the market today are still Bluetooth-tethered and don’t contain imagery as a feature, Snap spectacles, by Snapchat, have been in the market for over a year at this point — and by description Facebook is rolling out a rather similar design when its smart glasses hit the market sometime this year. The Snap glasses, according to reports, have run into technological and production roadblocks. Whether Facebook has suffered the same problems, and has a better mechanism to overcome them, remains to be seen.

But connected glasses seems to be a connected economy development that’s here to stay — though by all accounts we may still be a few years away from seeing them reach their mass market potential.

76 per cent of hospitalized COVID-19 patients experience symptoms six months later: study

Ben CousinsCTVNews.ca Writer

@cousins_ben ContactPublished Friday, January 8, 2021 7:19PM ESThttps://imasdk.googleapis.com/js/core/bridge3.433.1_en.html#goog_2076841684Volume 90% LIVE2 Digital Channel _{NOW PLAYING}There are currently no events scheduled on the LIVE2 digital channel. Check back soon to watch live events from across Canada and the world!CTV National News: ‘Everything is on the table’ _{NOW PLAYING}Ontario Premier Doug Ford warned stricter restrictions are coming as COVID-19 case numbers continue to spiral. 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OTTAWA — A new study from China shows that more than three quarters of COVID-19 patients who were sent to hospital experienced at least one symptom of the virus six months after first falling ill.

The cohort study, published on Friday in The Lancet, looked at 1,733 COVID-19 patients who were discharged from the Jin Yin-tan Hospital in Wuhan, China between January and May 2020 and found that 76 per cent of them continued to experience at least one of the symptoms six months later.

Among those who continued to experience symptoms, 63 per cent of patients had experienced persistent fatigue or muscle weakness, while 26 per cent had experienced difficulty sleeping and 23 per cent reported depression or anxiety.

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Full coverage at CTVNews.ca/Coronavirus

“Because COVID-19 is such a new disease, we are only beginning to understand some of its long-term effects on patients’ health,” Prof. Bin Cao, one of the co-authors from the National Center for Respiratory Medicine at the China-Japan Friendship Hospital and Capital Medical University, said in a news release.

•  Newsletter sign-up: Get The COVID-19 Brief sent to your inbox

“Our analysis indicates that most patients continue to live with at least some of the effects of the virus after leaving hospital, and highlights a need for post-discharge care, particularly for those who experience severe infections. Our work also underscores the importance of conducting longer follow-up studies in larger populations in order to understand the full spectrum of effects that COVID-19 can have on people.”

While all 1,733 patients were interviewed face-to-face six months after infection to gauge their long-term symptoms, some of the patients were also given additional testing, including an endurance walking test and lab tests of kidney function, to name a few.

A total of 349 patients were given a lung function test and 31 per cent of them had reduced lung function, while 23 per cent of the 1,692 people who took the walking test performed poorer than a normal person.

When it came to kidney function, 107 of the 822 patients who had normal kidneys while in the hospital had reduced kidney function six months later.

Another 94 patients were tested for neutralizing antibodies, and researchers found that 53 per cent of them had reduced antibody levels six months after their visit to the hospital. 

“The decline of neutralizing antibodies observed in the present study and other studies raises concern for SARS-CoV-2 re-infection,” the authors note in the study. “The risk of re-infection should be monitored for patients who present with compatible symptoms of COVID-19.”

This research is consistent with some other studies on the long-term symptoms of coronavirus patients. A 2007 study of patients hospitalized from SARS during the outbreak in Toronto found that 33 per cent of the 117 patients had experienced a “significant reduction in mental health” one year after infection, while 18 per cent of these patients also saw a significantly worse score in the walking endurance test.

The researchers in this latest study note that more research is needed when it comes to comparing the long-term side effects of those who were admitted to hospital and those who weren’t.

“Even though the study offers a comprehensive clinical picture of the aftermath of COVID-19 in hospitalized patients, only 4 per cent were admitted to an intensive care unit (ICU), rendering the information about the long-term consequences in this particular cohort inconclusive,” the authors wrote in the news release.

“Nonetheless, previous research on patient outcomes after ICU stays suggests that several COVID-19 patients who were critically ill while hospitalized will subsequently face impairments regarding their cognitive and mental health and/or physical function far beyond their hospital discharge.”RELATED IMAGES

• In this Dec. 22, 2020 file photo Phlebotomist lab assistant Jennifer Cukati, right, and Registered Nurse Carina Klescewski, left, care for a COVID-19 patient inside the Sutter Roseville Medical Center ICU in Roseville, Calif. (Renee C. Byer/The Sacramento Bee via AP, Pool,File)

New statistical method exponentially increases ability to discover genetic insights

by Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania

Pleiotropy analysis, which provides insight on how individual genes result in multiple characteristics, has become increasingly valuable as medicine continues to lean into mining genetics to inform disease treatments. Privacy stipulations, though, make it difficult to perform comprehensive pleiotropy analysis because individual patient data often can’t be easily and regularly shared between sites. However, a statistical method called Sum-Share, developed at Penn Medicine, can pull summary information from many different sites to generate significant insights. In a test of the method, published in Nature Communications, Sum-Share’s developers were able to detect more than 1,700 DNA-level variations that could be associated with five different cardiovascular conditions. If patient-specific information from just one site had been used, as is the norm now, only one variation would have been determined.https://91f510ad5401c2b88968f7d6595ddf8a.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-37/html/container.html

“Full research of pleiotropy has been difficult to accomplish because of restrictions on merging patient data from electronic health records at different sites, but we were able to figure out a method that turns summary-level data into results that are exponentially greater than what we could accomplish with individual-level data currently available,” said the one of the study’s senior authors, Jason Moore, Ph.D., director of the Institute for Biomedical Informatics and a professor of Biostatistics, Epidemiology and Informatics. “With Sum-Share, we greatly increase our abilities to unveil the genetic factors behind health conditions that range from those dealing with heart health, as was the case in this study, to mental health, with many different applications in between.”

Sum-Share is powered by bio-banks that pool de-identified patient data, including genetic information, from electronic health records (EHRs) for research purposes. For their study, Moore, co-senior author Yong Chen, Ph.D., an associate professor of Biostatistics, lead author Ruowang Li, Ph.D., a post-doc fellow at Penn, and their colleagues used eMERGE to pull seven different sets of EHRs to run through Sum-Share in an attempt to detect the genetic effects between five cardiovascular-related conditions: obesity, hypothyroidism, type 2 diabetes, hypercholesterolemia, and hyperlipidemia.

With Sum-Share, the researchers found 1,734 different single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs, which are differences in the building blocks of DNA) that could be tied to the five conditions. Then, using results from just one site’s EHR, only one SNP was identified that could be tied to the conditions.

Additionally, they determined that their findings were identical whether they used summary-level data or individual-level data in Sum-Share, making it a “lossless” system.

To determine the effectiveness of Sum-Share, the team then compared their method’s results with the previous leading method, PheWAS. This method operates best when it pulls what individual-level data has been made available from different EHRs. But when putting the two on a level playing field, allowing both to use individual-level data, Sum-Share was statistically determined to be more powerful in its findings than PheWAS. So, since Sum-Share’s summary-level data findings have been determined to be as insightful as when it uses individual-level data, it appears to be the best method for determining genetic characteristics.

“This was notable because Sum-Share enables loss-less data integration, while PheWAS loses some information when integrating information from multiple sites,” Li explained. “Sum-Share can also reduce the multiple hypothesis testing penalties by jointly modeling different characteristics at once.”

Currently, Sum-Share is mainly designed to be used as a research tool, but there are possibilities for using its insights to improve clinical operations. And, moving forward, there is a chance to use it for some of the most pressing needs facing health care today.

“Sum-Share could be used for COVID-19 with research consortia, such as the Consortium for Clinical Characterization of COVID-19 by EHR (4CE),” Yong said. “These efforts use a federated approach where the data stay local to preserve privacy.”

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Journal information:Nature CommunicationsProvided by Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania