With the money and time that visits to the ER and urgent care soak up, the chance to revisit old-fashioned physician house calls holds a strong appeal. What if the visit came from an intelligent machine? AI systems are already adept at recognizing patterns in medical imaging to aid in diagnosis. New findings published February 11 in Nature Medicine show similar training can work for deriving a diagnosis from the raw data in a child’s medical chart.
For this study at Guangzhou Women and Children’s Medical Center in southern China, a team of physicians distilled information from thousands of health records into key words linked to different diagnoses. Investigators then taught these key words to the AI system so it could detect the terms in real medical charts. Once trained, the system combed the electronic health records (EHRs) of 567,498 children, parsing the real-world physician notes and highlighting important information.
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They compared the machine’s conclusions with those in the original records—and they had another team of clinicians make diagnoses using the same data as the AI system.
The machine received good grades, agreeing with the humans about 90 percent of the time.
Read full, original post: A Machine Gets High Marks for Diagnosing Sick Children