Slashdot Mirror
Hospitals May Turn To Algorithms To Fight Fatal Infections (scientificamerican.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Scientific American: Clostridium difficile, a deadly bacterium spread by physical contact with objects or infected people, thrives in hospitals, causing 453,000 cases a year and 29,000 deaths in the United States, according to a 2015 study in the New England Journal of Medicine. Traditional methods such as monitoring hygiene and warning signs often fail to stop the disease. But what if it were possible to systematically target those most vulnerable to C-diff? Erica Shenoy, an infectious-disease specialist at Massachusetts General Hospital, and Jenna Wiens, a computer scientist and assistant professor of engineering at the University of Michigan, did just that when they created an algorithm to predict a patient's risk of developing a C-diff infection, or CDI. Using patients' vital signs and other health records, this method -- still in an experimental phase -- is something both researchers want to see integrated into hospital routines.
The CDI algorithm -- based on a form of artificial intelligence called machine learning -- is at the leading edge of a technological wave starting to hit the U.S. health care industry. After years of experimentation, machine learning's predictive powers are well-established, and it is poised to move from labs to broad real-world applications, said Zeeshan Syed, who directs Stanford University's Clinical Inference and Algorithms Program. Shenoy and Wiens' CDI algorithm analyzed a data set from 374,000 inpatient admissions to Massachusetts General Hospital and the University of Michigan Health System, seeking connections between cases of CDI and the circumstances behind them. The records contained over 4,000 distinct variables. As it repeatedly analyzes this data, the ML process extracts warning signs of disease that doctors may miss -- constellations of symptoms, circumstances and details of medical history most likely to result in infection at any point in the hospital stay.
The CDI algorithm -- based on a form of artificial intelligence called machine learning -- is at the leading edge of a technological wave starting to hit the U.S. health care industry. After years of experimentation, machine learning's predictive powers are well-established, and it is poised to move from labs to broad real-world applications, said Zeeshan Syed, who directs Stanford University's Clinical Inference and Algorithms Program. Shenoy and Wiens' CDI algorithm analyzed a data set from 374,000 inpatient admissions to Massachusetts General Hospital and the University of Michigan Health System, seeking connections between cases of CDI and the circumstances behind them. The records contained over 4,000 distinct variables. As it repeatedly analyzes this data, the ML process extracts warning signs of disease that doctors may miss -- constellations of symptoms, circumstances and details of medical history most likely to result in infection at any point in the hospital stay.
Isn't fighting a fatal infection somewhat of a waste of resources?
Let's make like a bird... and get the flock outta here.
We are already doing that. We use predictive analytics that processes dozens of data elements on each patient in the hospital and scores them for sepsis risk. The system then can do many things with that score. The most popular is paging to the attending provider and care team. This helps to reduce the cases of septic shock significantly.
I really thought there was going to be medical blockchains somewhere in the story. Maybe next week...
Serenity now, insanity later.
They aren't clean. It was a while ago but I doubt the attitudes have changed. I worked in the laundry and we failed our health inspection every time. Management didn't care. The inspector would come in and we wouldn't have fixed any of the things he sited us for the last time. We were a critical resource or some bullshit like that so the health inspector couldn't shut us down. The mopping of the floors and cleaning of the beds was superficial. Spraying disinfectant isn't cleaning, you actually have to remove the human excrement and fluids so the bacteria doesn't have a place to immediately repopulate.
Details:
KW Hospital - Kitchener, Ontario, Canada, laundry department
Years - 1987 -1989
Faulty practices - putting clean laundry on dirty laundry carts, staff covered in filth handling clean laundry, staff covered in filth delivering laundry, no fire or safety training (7 high school students got left in the building during a fire), no metal detector for sharp objects.
https://science.slashdot.org/s...
Recent development has indicated a popular "harmless" sugar additive as a likely culprit of causing two explosions in the occurrence of two nasty infections. Clostridium being one of them.
Start tackling that shit as prevention.
And yes, hand hygiene helps a lot, but is hard to do, as you would need to wash (with soap, not just alcohol) 100 times a day. That would cause a severe disturbance in the biotope on the nurses/doctors hands by itself!.
Yep, and not just sweeteners. 20% of C-diff conditions are caused by antibiotics. Anyone prescribed antibiotics should also be taking precautions to prevent C-diff taking hold.
Additionally, most people in he west don't get anywhere near enough fibre in their diet. Simply taking pre-biotic supplements (specific types of fibre) provides an environment in the intestines that encourage healthy bacteria to thrive and makes it extremely difficult for infections like C-diff to take hold.
Simply changing how doctors prescribe antibiotics and effectively encouraging pre-biotic consumption could make a bigger difference at less cost than buying in help from IT consultants who charge extortionate fees for doing stuff that more often than not gets mediocre results and creates more problems than it solves.
Debate is a form of harassment. Do not question my truth.