3 ms·

IBM has been conducting some promising tests of their Watson system (the one that won Jeopardy) in this area. Going back further, medical diagnosis was a class

by deong 10y ago

IBM has been conducting some promising tests of their Watson system (the one that won Jeopardy) in this area. Going back further, medical diagnosis was a classic application of expert systems even in the 1970s. They ended up being something of a failure then due to the need to laboriously extract huge amounts of knowledge from doctors to get them to work, but it does show that it's long been a popular idea in the field.

ScottBurson 10y ago
For example, Mycin [0] [1]. From the Wikipedia page: MYCIN was never actually used in practice but research indicated that it proposed an acceptable therapy in about 69% of cases, which was better than the performance of infectious disease experts who were judged using the same criteria. [...] Some observers raised ethical and legal issues related to the use of computers in medicine — if a program gives the wrong diagnosis or recommends the wrong therapy, who should be held responsible? However, the greatest problem, and the reason that MYCIN was not used in routine practice, was the state of technologies for system integration, especially at the time it was developed. MYCIN was a stand-alone system that required a user to enter all relevant information about a patient by typing in responses to questions MYCIN posed. The program ran on a large time-shared system, available over the early Internet (ARPANet), before personal computers were developed. In the modern era, such a system would be integrated with medical record systems, would extract answers to questions from patient databases, and would be much less dependent on physician entry of information. In the 1970s, a session with MYCIN could easily consume 30 minutes or more — an unrealistic time commitment for a busy clinician. Given that the systems integration problems should be soluble now, if not already solved, it does seem a little surprising that there isn't a modern version of such a thing, far more sophisticated, in general use. I guess the ethics and liability problems still loom larger than the above quote suggests. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mycin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mycin [1] http://people.dbmi.columbia.edu/~ehs7001/Buchanan-Shortliffe-1984/MYCIN%20Book.htm http://people.dbmi.columbia.edu/~ehs7001/Buchanan-Shortliffe...

by deong 10y ago

ScottBurson 10y ago

For example, Mycin [0] [1]. From the Wikipedia page: MYCIN was never actually used in practice but research indicated that it proposed an acceptable therapy in about 69% of cases, which was better than the performance of infectious disease experts who were judged using the same criteria. [...] Some observers raised ethical and legal issues related to the use of computers in medicine — if a program gives the wrong diagnosis or recommends the wrong therapy, who should be held responsible? However, the greatest problem, and the reason that MYCIN was not used in routine practice, was the state of technologies for system integration, especially at the time it was developed. MYCIN was a stand-alone system that required a user to enter all relevant information about a patient by typing in responses to questions MYCIN posed. The program ran on a large time-shared system, available over the early Internet (ARPANet), before personal computers were developed. In the modern era, such a system would be integrated with medical record systems, would extract answers to questions from patient databases, and would be much less dependent on physician entry of information. In the 1970s, a session with MYCIN could easily consume 30 minutes or more — an unrealistic time commitment for a busy clinician. Given that the systems integration problems should be soluble now, if not already solved, it does seem a little surprising that there isn't a modern version of such a thing, far more sophisticated, in general use. I guess the ethics and liability problems still loom larger than the above quote suggests. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mycin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mycin [1] http://people.dbmi.columbia.edu/~ehs7001/Buchanan-Shortliffe-1984/MYCIN%20Book.htm http://people.dbmi.columbia.edu/~ehs7001/Buchanan-Shortliffe...