AI helps breast cancer patients

Non-profit group to keep askellyn.ai free for everyone

The world’s first question-and-answer AI for people battling breast cancer was launched in Kitchener and a non-profit foundation aims to take it around the world and keep it available free of charge.

It is easy to find and use. Go to askellyn.ai and start typing questions.

Ellyn Winters, a breast cancer survivor, is the driving force behind the ambitious undertaking to help people battle the second-leading cause of death among women in Canada.

After writing about her breast cancer diagnosis and treatment in the Globe and Mail, Winters received hundreds of emails from women across the country.

“So I wrote a book,” said Winters, the president and chief marketing officer at Ignition Communications.

“Flat Please: Hold the Shame” was published on Amazon last month as a “girlfriend’s companion” that helps people with breast cancer, and their families, navigate the emotions, myriad choices and bewildering language of oncologists and surgeons.

“Women are so shell-shocked by what’s going on and they often don’t do their research, and they sometimes end up on pathways that they didn’t need to be on, or don’t want to be on,” said Winters.

She does a lot of work with startups and tech firms, and one of her contacts, Patrick Belliveau, the cofounder and CEO at Shift Reality, was curious about her book.

Belliveau wanted to immediately help after Winters told him why a book like hers was necessary — many of the online support groups can be hard on people battling breast cancer.

If a group member has Stage 4 cancer, and is in an emotional spiral, they can take everyone else in the group down. That doesn’t help someone with a fresh diagnosis. It makes everything worse.

Belliveau believed a conversational AI based on Winter’s book, using ChatGPT technology, was the way to go. The technology does not collect or share personal data. It is free. Anyone can use it — a partner, parent, sibling or child of someone diagnosed with breast cancer.

It is all about emotional support, practical advice and explaining options and terms. It does not provide medical advice or diagnoses.

“No shame or judgment. It will try to meet you where you are and build you back up, as a friend would do,” said Belliveau. “We keep it grounded and rooted in Ellyn’s book.”

The askellyn.ai uses ChatGPT 3.5 and ChatGPT 4. The rise of the technology during the past year spawned seemingly endless controversy — with fears that it will eliminate millions of jobs, steal creative work and give wrong answers. The technology sparked lawsuits from high-profile authors like John Grisham over copyright infringement.

All of that controversy drowned out voices like Belliveau’s, who believes generative AI can be deployed in ways to help people — AI for good.

“The truth of it is, I want my son to be proud of me for something I did,” said Belliveau. “For me this is a legacy.”

He brought on two others to help — Chris Silivestru, a computer scientist, and Ryan Burgio, a managing partner at Stryve Digital Marketing.

Silivestru is the principal developer of the askellyn.ai. He had to create a novel framework using different GhatGPT models to ground the AI in Winters’ book.

“I believe AI is a net good for humanity. We just have to keep pushing stories and use-cases like this,” said Silivestru.

Burgio became fascinated with AI, and he and Silivestru launched Gambit to experiment with the latest advances in the technology.

“AskEllyn was a great opportunity to build something meaningful,” said Burgio. “We want to change the narrative around AI — it is all negative, and we believe it is positive.”

Belliveau, Silivestru and Burgio were among more than 200 people attending the launch of askellyn.ai last Thursday at Catalyst137 in Kitchener.

In March 2022 Winters was diagnosed with breast cancer. About three months later she underwent a double mastectomy. When cancer was later detected in her lymph nodes she had chemotherapy as well during the summer of 2022.

After years of helping startups and tech firms with communications and marketing, she founded her own startup, AskEllyn, and the non-profit called The Lyndall Project, which is named after her father.

“Every clinician I have shown AskEllyn to acknowledges there is a big gap in the patient care,” said Winters. “There are thousands of questions people have when they are diagnosed with the disease that don’t have to be answered by a doctor.”

She wrote her book, founded the startup and non-profit to support it in less than 18 months.

“I feel fine,” said Winters. “You live your life with a lot more urgency when something like this happens. It is really important. I want to leave a legacy, I want to do good things in the world and help other people.”