Modern medicine does wonders when it comes to targeted healing
of our specific ailments - especially when it comes to mechanical malfunction
of a body part. Surgeons can go to very precise organs and fix or even replace
them with bionic parts.
While the health care system trains doctor to test, scan and
treat targeted ailments, every now and then, we come across anecdotes of
physicians not being able to think holistically to produce the correct
diagnosis. Today's diagnosis is often done by individual symptoms or test
results - not by connecting the dots of myriad other discrete symptoms or past
health history of the patient. In other words, even the best medical technology
is still ways off from treating the human body as a super-complex system.
A friend of mine has been seeing doctors for years with many
individual but apparently unrelated issues - backache, fatigue, recurring eye
redness and on and on. Every time she received "adequate" treatments
for the specific conditions but they all kept coming back. Not until she, at
the behest of another friend with similar history, researched and consulted
multiple experts could she find her real underlying degenerative chronic
auto-immune condition.
So what have big data and artificial intelligence got to do
with this? Could be a lot.
In an engineering conference for the automotive industry (where I
work), Rob High, CTO of IBM Watson
Solutions, made a case for 'big data' and cognitive computing in solving
complex problems including medical diagnostics. Integrating myriad medical data and past history in to a
cohesive medical diagnosis can be a computing challenge. Even if we ignore the
lack of holistic approach, modern health care in many ways
is becoming victim of its own rapid progress. According to Dr. High, new medical
information and discoveries now double every two years. Nearly, 80000 pages of
new medical information are created daily. Yet, a typical medical practitioner
hardly keeps in touch with a meager fraction of these new discoveries. An
average doctor, processes no more than 5% of this growing knowledge base and is
often miserably outdated. 81% of physicians don't even spare five hours per
month to keep up.
In 2011, IBM
demonstrated its own progress in artificial intelligence, data analytics and
cognitive computing when its Watson computer program bested Ken Jennings and
Brad Rutter - the all time best Jeopardy! champions in a three-day competition. What Watson demonstrated
was its capability to understand the clues and contexts hidden in an 'answer' and
then to analyze all relevant information and prior learning from its very large
memory and produce the most statistically relevant outcome. Clearly the same technology
has potential to lend a hand to develop more integrated medical diagnoses.
I am encouraged
that Cleveland Clinic is looking to apply this technology for its expert "diagnosticassistant'. I also hope
that someday, smart evidence-based (if not fully holistic) treatment as indicated by
this Youtube demo about oncology treatment may become routine.
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