3 ms·

>...Job security for physicians is rarely the issue, there are plenty of sick people. Yea you would think so... Unfortunately, in medicine, just because a comp

by opo 8y ago

>...Job security for physicians is rarely the issue, there are plenty of sick people. Yea you would think so... Unfortunately, in medicine, just because a computer program is better then a Dr at diagnosing a patient is no guarantee it will be used. The classic example here was the MYCIN expert system developed in the 1970s. MYCIN was shown to outperform infectious disease experts by 1979 in a blind testing: >... Eight independent evaluators with special expertise in the management of meningitis compared MYCIN's choice of antimicrobials with the choices of nine human prescribers for ten test cases of meningitis. MYCIN received an acceptability rating of 65% by the evaluators; the corresponding ratings for acceptability of the regimen prescribed by the five faculty specialists ranged from 42.5% to 62.5%. The system never failed to cover a treatable pathogen while demonstrating efficiency in minimizing the number of antimicrobials prescribed. https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/article-abstract/366606 https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/article-abstract/36660... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mycin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mycin

HeadsUpHigh 8y ago
There are good reasons why MYCIN and similar systems were never accepted, mainly the fact that diagnosing an infectious disease is pretty useless on it's own. If the doctor has already narrowed it down to an infectious disease, telling which one it is is trivial. The hard part is getting there.
- opo 8y ago
  >... diagnosing an infectious disease is pretty useless on it's own. I don't think that was what was being measured. The evaluation was a comparison of: >...MYCIN's choice of antimicrobials with the choices of nine human prescribers for ten test cases of meningitis. In that evaluation: >...MYCIN received an acceptability rating of 65% by the evaluators; the corresponding ratings for acceptability of the regimen prescribed by the five faculty specialists ranged from 42.5% to 62.5%. The fact that the acceptability ratings of the five faculty specialists ranged from 42.5% to 62.5% implies that this isn't a trivial problem.

by opo 8y ago

HeadsUpHigh 8y ago

There are good reasons why MYCIN and similar systems were never accepted, mainly the fact that diagnosing an infectious disease is pretty useless on it's own. If the doctor has already narrowed it down to an infectious disease, telling which one it is is trivial. The hard part is getting there.

opo 8y ago
>... diagnosing an infectious disease is pretty useless on it's own. I don't think that was what was being measured. The evaluation was a comparison of: >...MYCIN's choice of antimicrobials with the choices of nine human prescribers for ten test cases of meningitis. In that evaluation: >...MYCIN received an acceptability rating of 65% by the evaluators; the corresponding ratings for acceptability of the regimen prescribed by the five faculty specialists ranged from 42.5% to 62.5%. The fact that the acceptability ratings of the five faculty specialists ranged from 42.5% to 62.5% implies that this isn't a trivial problem.