• The initiative of scientific dissemination is organized in parallel in 27 different countries, and was held in the city of Girona with talks at the bars Sbar-jo, Kerunta and Cu-cut for three consecutive days.
• The presentations by IDIBGI researchers, dealt with the relationship between artificial intelligence and medicine, and the study of the intestinal microbiota and its link with depression or memory with fruit flies.

Pint of Science, the festival that brings local science to the bars of reference of the city, landed again in the Girona region last May 22nd, 23rd and 24th. The biomedical research of the Institute of Biomedical Research of Girona Dr. Josep Trueta (IDIBGI), was one of the protagonists in the various presentations, which brought research to the general public.

Artificial intelligence reaches the field of medicine

Monday May 22th, the SBAR-JO bar hosted the lecture: Artificial intelligence and medicine: Where are we and where are we going? Prostate cancer, MRI and artificial intelligence. Dr. Kai Vilanova, an established researcher in the Medical Imaging IDIBGI group, spoke about the European project ProCAncer-I, which is creating an artificial intelligence tool to improve the prostate cancer pathway. The project consortium is training the algorithm with more than 15,000 magnetic resonance images of cases, one of the largest databases in the world in this field. The session was also attended by the VICOROB research group, from the University of Girona, who are also working on the close relationship that AI and its application in medicine can have in the field of engineering.

Fruit flies, our great allies

The following day, Tuesday May 23rd, the Kerunta brewery, located in the heart of Girona, was the setting to show the importance of the influence of the intestinal microbiota in numerous processes of our body, and how, through its study, it has been possible to demonstrate that it influences depression and memory.

The Nutrition, Eumetabolism and Health IDIBGI research group was in charge of making visible the great role of fruit flies in the research of the so-called microbiota-brain axis. The presentation, entitled The thousand flies of Sant Narcís: What is the relationship between memory and depression? by Dr. Jordi Mayneris, Irene Puig and Lisset de la Vega made even more legendary the figure of the fly in the city of Girona. The three speakers stressed that the vinegar fly is a good biomedical model to study certain diseases, since humans share with them 75% of the genes that cause diseases.

Attendees were very pleased to get a close look at the biomedical research being carried out in IDIBGI's laboratories. The Pint of Science festival demonstrated that initiatives of this type awaken the scientific interest of the general public.