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Computers Shown To Be Better Than Docs At Diagnosing, Prescribing Treatment
Lucas123 writes "Applying the same technology used for voice recognition and credit card fraud detection to medical treatments could cut healthcare costs and improve patient outcomes by almost 50%, according to new research. Scientists at Indiana University found that using patient data with machine-learning algorithms can drastically improve both the cost and quality of healthcare through simulation modeling.The artificial intelligence models used for diagnosing and treating patients obtained a 30% to 35% increase in positive patient outcomes, the research found. This is not the first time AI has been used to diagnose and suggest treatments. Last year, IBM announced that its Watson supercomputer would be used in evaluating evidence-based cancer treatment options for physicians, driving the decision-making process down to a matter of seconds."
An expected outcome. First machines become good and cheap at performing manual labor, then it's lowly qualified jobs such as sorting stuff or basic accounting.
In a few years, liberal professions will fall. Our salaries (I'm a doctor) have been diving as more and more people around the world can afford a career and achieve a good enough level to perform as a doctor or an engineer.
Creative and risk-taking careers will resist for a longer time.
We can hope for a future of working machines and humans enjoying themselves. The other option will be cheap-ass humans with no way of earning a living whatsoever.
I find this interesting, I was wondering when we'd reach the point where the accumulation of knowledge available in any given field exceeded the ability of the human mind to completely grasp in a useful manner. It's going to reach a situation where multiple experts on a given subject with a fair idea about related subjects are going to be the only unit capable of actually doing anything sooner rather than later - apparently in medicine at least computers have come to the rescue.
I suppose with the many specialisations in every area we're already there, the question is can we repeat the improved returns in areas like physics and chemistry.
In the early 1970s, Mycin achieved 69% accuracy of prescribing a "correct" treatment for a patient's condition, which was deemed better than human specialists.
The linked articles don't seem to include the absolute accuracy that it achieves, just the relative accuracy against doctors. I wonder if we've come any further than the basic expert system rules allowed 40 years ago.
I don't care what this article says, this is nothing new. My in-home psychiatrist in the 1990s was great at diagnosing my issues. Perhaps you were a patient of his, too? His name was Dr. Sbaitso.
The problem with doctors is their ego. Being a nurse for quite some time Ive seen countless doctors come through the hospital that do not treat a patient properly, ignore patient complaints, dont treat problems aggresively enough, are too passive, and so on and the vast majority of them refuse to do otherwise because of their ego. They are doctors, no one should question them and they hate it when you do and when you do they dig their heels in and dont budge. Doctors are also human so they get tired of their job, they get lazy, they stop caring after awhile, they worry more about what they will do later than the problem at hand, they stay up too late.
Ive also seen countless times people who swear by these doctors and will accuse of them of fault simply because the doctor has been nice to them. A doctor who is friendly can do no wrong in a patients eyes. Or a patient has some common problem that even a moron could treat, then when the doctor fixes them suddenly they become godlike.
Personally I would trust the diagnosis of a machine that has more information programmed into it than a thousand doctors do collectively from allover the world.
A machine can be a doctor because thats how doctors are trained, they are trained to be machines. They treat the problem, they do not treat the person. Treating the person is a nurses job. And treating the problem is simply nothing more than deduction. If patient has multiple problems then you take those numbers and it will lead you to the correct answer. Thats all being a doctor is, you look at the signs and symptoms, then you add them alltogether and you get the answer as to what the cause is. Its all a forumla and nothing more, there is no great mystery to it.
Apart from doctors who will understandably not want to be rendered obsolete (and they won't be -- the computer can only prescribe a treatment, not administer it!), the main objection that would be raised to this is "What if the computer makes a mistake?" For some reason, people are really bad at understanding that even though the computer might make a mistake, it will make mistakes at a lower rate than a human. This is the same problem with computer-driven automobiles. Yes, the computer might screw something up and kill somebody, but this should happen at a much lower rate than caused by human drivers -- however, because the rate isn't EXACTLY ZERO it is seen as completely unacceptable, even though this is an irrational position to maintain.
This sort of thing is just what big pharma wants, no human interaction and careful consideration, just a pill dispenser...symptom a + symptom B == Pill 2...
How much you wanna bet this thing always prescribes expensive non generic drugs and never tries the 50-70 year old known treatments that are usually the first steps in treatment before new expensive drugs are prescribed.
Also, anyone notice the change in medical advertising and communications, they never say "ask your doctor" any more, its ask your prescriber, or ask your provider...like they want to dis-intermediate doctors and are getting the public ready.
And will the system consider the patients age/cost to treat/insurance level/likelihood of patient paying future insurance premiums to make up for expenses?
It will if you program it to. Things like this are tools. As a relatively young doctor (resident) I welcome things like this. Every doctor I know uses reference material, some are printed on dead trees and some are electronic. Today, there's not much difference. But the point it is that there's too much medical knowledge for one person to keep it all in their head at one time. If something like this were to come to market it wouldn't be replacing doctors, it would be augmenting them. Machines do what we tell them to, always have and (hopefully) always will. False rivalries like this completely miss the point. I would love to have a computer algorithm that could correctly diagnose 99% of the time even if it were flagrently wrong the other 1%. That's why humans are in the loop.
... is that the computer doesn't have, literally, hands-on experience.
For example... you have stomach pain. Okay. Where? Does this hurt? Does it hurt if I poke this? Do you have a fever? How high? ("Oh, I don't know, maybe XX" ...)...
In other words, you still need someone who *knows* what to do to help diagnose simply to *get* the information. You need someone trained to know where to poke, where to tap, where to see if something hurts. And then, of course, to try to wheedle the real information out rather than the confusing answers patients (note that I am not a doctor, I am a patient) give. :)
As a diagnostic tool, I think it would be a huge benefit. An individual simply can't keep up to date on everything, don't know everything, and can't research everything. Having a diagnostic tool that *does* do all that would be a huge benefit. There would be options and diagnoses that perhaps the doctor had not thought about. Additionally, the diagnostic tool - I hope! - would not just say "Oh, it's this" but would perhaps say "Well, it could be this, and you need to find out this information first ... or it could be this, and for that you need to do these tests..."
The idea that a patient, combined with a non-trained non-doctor, can somehow come up with all the right answers/information and a machine can simply diagnose it on the spot seems like a very simplistic view. Perhaps that works with colds, the flu, or warts... but for more complex things... it seems diagnoses tend to work on a "it could be this; let's do more specific tests to find out if it is" type of investigation.