This appeared a little with ago.
Artificial Intelligence Is Now Telling Doctors How to Treat You
- By Daniela Hernandez, Kaiser Health News
- 06.02.14 | 6:30 am |
Long Island dermatologist Kavita Mariwalla knows how to treat acne, burns, and rashes. But when a patient came in with a potentially disfiguring case of bullous pemphigoid–a rare skin condition that causes large, watery blisters–she was stumped. The medication doctors usually prescribe for the autoimmune disorder wasn’t available. So she logged in to Modernizing Medicine, a web-based repository of medical information and insights.
Within seconds, she had the name of another drug that had worked in comparable cases. “It gives you access to data, and data is king,” Mariwalla says of Modernizing Medicine. “It’s been very helpful, especially in clinically challenging situations.”
The system, one of a growing number of similar tools around the country, lets Mariwalla tap the collective knowledge gathered from roughly 3,700 providers and more than 14 million patient visits, as well as data on treatments other doctors have provided to patients with similar profiles. Using the same kind of artificial intelligence that underpins some of the web’s largest sites, it instantly mines this data and spits out recommendations. It’s a bit like Amazon.com recommending purchases based on its massive trove of data about what people have bought in the past.
Using the same kind of artificial intelligence that underpins some of the web’s largest sites, it instantly mines this data and spits out recommendations.
Tech titans like Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Apple already have made huge investments in artificial intelligence to deliver tailored search results and build virtual personal assistants. Now, that approach is starting to trickle down into health care, thanks in part to the push under the health reform law to leverage new technologies to improve outcomes and reduce costs–and to the availability of cheaper and more powerful computers. In an effort to better treat their patients, doctors are now exploring the use of everything from IBM’s Watson supercomputer, the machine that won at Jeopardy, to iPhone-like pop-up notifications that appear in your online medical records.
Artificial intelligence is still in the very early stages of development–in so many ways, it can’t match our own intelligence–and computers certainly can’t replace doctors at the bedside. But today’s machines are capable of crunching vast amounts of data and identifying patterns that humans can’t. Artificial intelligence–essentially the complex algorithms that analyze this data–can be a tool to take full advantage of electronic medical records, transforming them from mere e-filing cabinets into full-fledged doctors’ aides that can deliver clinically relevant, high-quality data in real time. “Electronic health records [are] like large quarries where there’s lots of gold, and we’re just beginning to mine them,” said Dr. Eric Horvitz, who is the managing director of Microsoft Research and specializes in applying artificial intelligence in health care settings.
Increasingly, physician practices and hospitals around the country are using supercomputers and homegrown systems to identify patients who might be at risk for kidney failure, cardiac disease, or postoperative infections, and to prevent hospital re-admissions, another key focus of health reform. And they’re starting to combine patients’ individual health data–including genetic information–with the wealth of material available in public databases, textbooks, and journals to help come up with more personalized treatments.
For now, the recommendations from Modernizing Medicine are largely based on what is most popular among fellow professionals–say, how often doctors on the platform prescribe a given drug or order a particular lab test. But this month, the system will display data on patient outcomes that the company has collected from its subscribers over the past year. Doctors will also be able to double-check the information against the latest clinical research by querying Watson, IBM’s artificially intelligent supercomputer. “What happens in the real world should be informed by what’s happening in the medical journals,” said Daniel Cane, CEO of Florida-based Modernizing Medicine. “That information needs to get to the provider at the point of care.”
Lots more here with some really interesting work being done:
Amazingly, just after this appears we have this:
'Super computer' first to pass Turing Test, convince judges it's alive
Date June 9, 2014 - 7:01AM
A computer program has become the first to pass a Turing test by fooling 33 per cent of humans that it was a 13-year-old Ukrainian boy.
A "super computer" has duped humans into thinking it was a 13-year-old boy to become the first machine to pass the "iconic" Turing Test, experts say.
Five machines were tested at the Royal Society in central London to see if they could fool people into thinking they were humans during text-based conversations.
The test was devised in 1950 by computer science pioneer and World War II code breaker Alan Turing, who said that if a machine was indistinguishable from a human, then it was "thinking".
No computer had ever previously passed the Turing Test, which requires 30 per cent of human interrogators to be duped during a series of five-minute keyboard conversations, organisers from the University of Reading said.
But "Eugene Goostman", a computer program developed to simulate a 13-year-old boy, managed to convince 33 per cent of the judges that it was human, the university said.
Lots more here:
So we now have a computer passing the late great Alan Turing’s test for machine ‘consciousness’ and we have concrete examples of AI really helping in the care of patients.
The world would seem to be changing a good deal more quickly than anyone could have imagined. The impact of the advances described in the first article - and what will follow is hard to underestimate.
Wikipedia provides some interesting views of what might be possible. See here:
We surely do live in interesting times!
David.
2 comments:
"'Super computer' first to pass Turing Test" .. sorry but fooling some of the judges only some of the time shouldn't count.
~~~~ Tim C.
What happens if there is a bad diagnosis - who do you sue?
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