Big
Data March 13, 2016 -- Can machines discover medical knowledge? In a frank interview with Dana Ludwig, MD, this notion and many more are discussed. Medical data is huge and complex. The Epic electronic health record alone has 13,000 tables, and there are many more databases to mine. Ludwig says, Machine learning algorithms might find associations that I don't know about by crawling through the massive tables. Given the 100,000 variables that we have on line, have the machines crawl through and see which ones are predictive of [some] diagnosis code. I don't know whether the algorithms can do a better job than the experts can do, but I'd like to find out. The goal of the neural networks is to let the algorithm discover the attributes that are predictive rather than presupposing that the experts can name them. Can machines make discoveries that human experts cannot? Read the interview here. |
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Dan Keller's Nursing, Health Policy & Healthcare Technology Blog
Nursing Informatics · Clinical Perspectives · Healthcare Systems
"The United States alone [among wealthy countries] treats health care as a commodity to be distributed according to the ability to pay rather than a social service to be distributed according to medical need." — JAMA (2003), 290, 798