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Medical Breakthrough in Spinal Cord Injuries Was Made by a Computer Program

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Re: Medical Breakthrough in Spinal Cord Injuries Was Made by a Computer Program

#31

Post by dougmany »

cryoshon wrote: post #8
mfoy_ wrote: post #3

I think the second big take away is that this was only made possible because the scientists willingly shared their "dark data"-- data and lab notes from failed experiments. I wonder how much data is hoarded privately and never opened up and analyzed like this.

Frequently a lot of this hoarded data is flawed or defective due to improper setup or execution of the experiment. That isn't to say the information in this "dark data" is useless, but it needs to be taken in context. The cleanest data with the best results are put forward into a paper; the chaff is not.

It is also possible that the data is not understood and therefor thought to be flawed. The article talks about how the black box approach removes human bias from the initial findings.

Re: Medical Breakthrough in Spinal Cord Injuries Was Made by a Computer Program

#32

Post by cousin_it »

skywhopper wrote: post #24

The substance of the article is quite interesting, but the headline and premise--that it was a computer program and not humans who found the result--is ridiculous. The computer program did not collate and index the raw data and notes. The computer program did not choose the relevant inputs from the sum of all knowledge. And most importantly, the computer program did not write itself. Software is a tool that humans cr…

> And most importantly, the computer program did not write itself.

Perhaps even more importantly, you didn't create yourself either :-)

Re: Medical Breakthrough in Spinal Cord Injuries Was Made by a Computer Program

#33

Post by xixi77 »

One immediate question is whether this might be a result of overfitting -- when enough hypotheses are tested, some will surely be confirmed at any given significance level. Still quite interesting of course; now what is needed is a follow-up study on other datasets (preferrably human), or an experiment to confirm. A better (but less exciting) title would be "A computer program suggests a promising avenue of research".

Re: Medical Breakthrough in Spinal Cord Injuries Was Made by a Computer Program

#34

Post by [deleted] »

skywhopper wrote: post #24

The substance of the article is quite interesting, but the headline and premise--that it was a computer program and not humans who found the result--is ridiculous. The computer program did not collate and index the raw data and notes. The computer program did not choose the relevant inputs from the sum of all knowledge. And most importantly, the computer program did not write itself. Software is a tool that humans cr…

[deleted]

Re: Medical Breakthrough in Spinal Cord Injuries Was Made by a Computer Program

#35

Post by wlesieutre »

dmd wrote: post #16
catshirt wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

biology is not my forte but- i imagine "dark data" (with context) is always more valuable than no data.

Last time your build failed because you made a typo, did you package it up and release that version anyway?

This could be useful information to someone learning not to make typos!

Or it could not. Probably that one.

Re: Medical Breakthrough in Spinal Cord Injuries Was Made by a Computer Program

#36

Post by catshirt »

dmd wrote: post #16
catshirt wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

biology is not my forte but- i imagine "dark data" (with context) is always more valuable than no data.

Last time your build failed because you made a typo, did you package it up and release that version anyway?

a paper is not a black box with inputs and outputs.

would i release a package? no. would i release the source code? why not?

code isn't irrelevant or useless just because it can't build. this is why we can teach code on a whiteboard.

Re: Medical Breakthrough in Spinal Cord Injuries Was Made by a Computer Program

#37

Post by pmiller2 »

edoloughlin wrote: post #15
andreasklinger wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

next up: "let's depend funding on how much data is shared and other people use it" after that: "researchers overshare data and use each others data for no reason but to bump numbers" it's interesting how every system tends to sooner or later be gamified by its players

I was looking for an SMBC strip that captures this (there's got to be one) but this is the closest I could get: http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?id=1624

I'm, unfortunately, very familiar with the LPU (Least Publishable Unit) after having been to grad school. It's actually a thing, especially among pre-tenure people.

Re: Medical Breakthrough in Spinal Cord Injuries Was Made by a Computer Program

#39

Post by cryoshon »

wyager wrote: post #21
dmd wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Last time your build failed because you made a typo, did you package it up and release that version anyway?

Bad analogy. There's a lot more to learn from a failed medical experiment than a failed build.

Depends on whether the lessons have already been learned or not.

For stuff like "we fucked up our culture, therefore our cells couldn't do whatever we wanted" is well understood.

In clinical trials where some patients may respond to a treatment and others not, there's definitely a lot more to learn there, if you have a large enough data set and a plurality of controls.

Re: Medical Breakthrough in Spinal Cord Injuries Was Made by a Computer Program

#40

Post by pmiller2 »

cryoshon wrote: post #7

"The process was outlined in a paper published today in Nature, and hints at the possibility of medical breakthroughs lurking in the data of failed experiments." If there was some way to make sense of data from negative-results experiments reliably, it would be absolutely revolutionary and certainly turn our ideas about what constitutes a successful experiment onto its head. I am very hopeful for fruitful results fro…

> Any exploration of data from negative-results experiments needs to be taken very narrowly, with a deep understanding of exactly what effect is being examined.

I disagree. There's value in data mining previous experiments, just not conclusive value. As long as the results of such data mining are limited to generating new hypotheses (which are then tested by experiments explicitly designed to do so), I think this methodology can have great value. In this particular case, I don't think it's a surprise that perioperative hypertension is associated with worse outcomes, but the hypothesis that controlling BP with medication before surgery and on through recovery might produce better outcomes is worth investigating.

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