The US Department of the Treasury (USDT) has imposed sanctions on a Russian government-controlled research institute found to be linked to the Triton malware.

Treasury said Friday the State Research Center of the Russian Federation FGUP Central Scientific Research Institute of Chemistry and Mechanics, also known as TsNIIKhM, was behind a 2017 cyber attack against a petrochemical facility in the Middle East, using the malware.

TsNIIKhM was also found to be surveying at least 20 U.S. electric facilities for cyber vulnerabilities in 2019. The Triton malware, also called HatMan and TRISIS, targets industrial safety systems at critical infrastructure facilities.

“As a result of today’s designation, all property and interests in property of TsNIIKhM that are in or come within the possession of U.S. persons are blocked, and U.S. persons are generally prohibited from engaging in transactions with them,” the department’s statement reads. “Additionally, any entities 50 percent or more owned by one or more designated persons are also blocked.”

The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) is conducting a pilot of an artificial intelligence platform that could help predict a COVID-19 patient’s prognosis and address the individual’s treatment needs, Nextgov reported Friday.

“The problem is, given a positive detection of COVID viral test—if someone has a positive test—what is the prognosis? Will the patient need hospitalization? Are they at risk of death, etc.? What will be their needs?” Gil Alterovitz, director of AI at the VA said Thursday at the Genius Machines 2020 Virtual Summit. “The approach was to develop an applied AI model for that using both clinical and nonclinical information.”

A team at VA began working on the AI tool in early spring using collected data from over 11,000 patients. The team then examined how patients’ blood pressure, heart rate, pre-existing conditions and other health factors affect their mortality and recovery rates.

“It’s being used already operationally,” Alterovitz, head of the National Artificial Intelligence Institute (NAII) at VA, said of the new AI tool. “And we’re going to be now working with other medical sites to see how this can be used across the country in different settings, as well.”

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The U.S. Army tested approximately 30 technologies during the Network Modernization Experiment 2020 and reported breakthroughs on satellite communications, millimeter waveforms and radio resiliency as part of the next set of tactical network tools called Capability Set ’23, C4ISRNET reported Friday.

The C5ISR Center of the service’s Combat Capability Development Command conducted the NetModX field experiment from July 20 through Oct. 2 at Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst in New Jersey and one of the technologies tested for Capability Set ’23 is a Silvus-built radio.

The radio team at the C5ISR Center integrated power control and interference avoidance capabilities into the Silvus radio as part of the experiment. One of the satcom capabilities tested by the service during NetModX is the interference cancelation technology.

“Interference cancellation has very advanced algorithms that are actually able to separate the interference from the original signal of interest, the signal that you want to receive, clean it up and present that back at the sanctuary hub, thus allowing the communication to continue going on even though you’re being jammed by an adversary,” said Jeremy Zwirn, an electronics engineer for the C5ISR Center’s satcom resiliency team.

The Joint Artificial Intelligence Center (JAIC) and Defense Innovation Unit (DIU) are collaborating on efforts to use AI algorithms to establish new medical diagnostic techniques and improve the management of health data.

As part of the Predictive Health effort, the two Department of Defense (DoD) entities recently developed an augmented reality microscope (ARM) that uses AI algorithms to detect specific cancer cell types through cloud-based digital images, JAIC said Wednesday

The team is slated to deploy the first ARM device to Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio, Texas, before delivering more of the microscopes to military treatment facilities worldwide.

In addition to ARM, JAIC’s Warfighter Health Mission Initiative and DIU are also working to develop an application programming interface that leverages AI algorithms and digital data cards to improve the management of the DoD’s historical medical data.

The effort is envisioned to support the Defense Health Agency’s (DHA) Joint Pathology Center, which manages over 55 million pathology specimen slides and is working to digitize its repository in Silver Spring, Maryland.

JAIC’s Warfighter Health team plans to collaborate with other stakeholders to develop algorithms and use the digitized samples to support AI-driven cancer detection approaches.

DIU and JAIC expect to continue work on the Predictive Health initiative as the Warfighter Health team prepares to transition to JAIC’s Joint Common Foundation (JCF) development platform.

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