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Ask HN: What medical datasets do you need?

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Re: Ask HN: What medical datasets do you need?

#61

Post by brut »

fratlas wrote: post #37
Entangled wrote: post #28

Dermatology, eye conditions, blood cells, tissue, viruses, urine, saliva, everything that can allow an app to give you a first diagnose before heading to the doctor. I foresee in less than ten years we will have a doctor in our pockets. No, it won't cure us and it won't replace a doctor, but it will give us all the information we need to have a 99% certainty of our condition. -- Second batch for animals and their con…

While I think it'll happen eventually, medicine is not at all black and white. Anecdotal, but I had a suspicious mole looked at, the doctor couldn't decide, got a second opinion from their colleague, he still was only 90% sure. And that's a relatively simple example. Doctors are some of the smartest/hard working people in society, and if they can still make mistakes, medical-grade AI is a long way off.

I think you will see much less "disagreement" between AIs than between doctors. I.e., subjectivity of diagnosis can be much more easily accounted for in an algorithm than in a person...

Re: Ask HN: What medical datasets do you need?

#62

Post by thedailymail »

surgeryres wrote: post #33
Entangled wrote: post #28

Dermatology, eye conditions, blood cells, tissue, viruses, urine, saliva, everything that can allow an app to give you a first diagnose before heading to the doctor. I foresee in less than ten years we will have a doctor in our pockets. No, it won't cure us and it won't replace a doctor, but it will give us all the information we need to have a 99% certainty of our condition. -- Second batch for animals and their con…

One potential problem with this - the question of liability, and who is responsible for diagnostic accuracy? In this case, for some "Lab on a Chip" device providing a patient directly with diagnostic information without the vetting of a human doctor, liability would sit with the company. IBM's Watson at MD Anderson Cancer center did not work out real well for them. In other words, using AI in the realm of medical dia…

I agree that the current excitement over medical AI seems wildly optimistic, but the problems with Watson at MD Anderson were more due to gross mismanagement on the MD Anderson side. https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/02/ibms-watson-proves-u...

Re: Ask HN: What medical datasets do you need?

#63

Post by BigJono »

surgeryres wrote: post #33
Entangled wrote: post #28

Dermatology, eye conditions, blood cells, tissue, viruses, urine, saliva, everything that can allow an app to give you a first diagnose before heading to the doctor. I foresee in less than ten years we will have a doctor in our pockets. No, it won't cure us and it won't replace a doctor, but it will give us all the information we need to have a 99% certainty of our condition. -- Second batch for animals and their con…

One potential problem with this - the question of liability, and who is responsible for diagnostic accuracy? In this case, for some "Lab on a Chip" device providing a patient directly with diagnostic information without the vetting of a human doctor, liability would sit with the company. IBM's Watson at MD Anderson Cancer center did not work out real well for them. In other words, using AI in the realm of medical dia…

This seems like an easy question to answer. The liability lies with the user until they seek the professional advice of a doctor.

Say a user decides to self-diagnose and damages themselves (either through inaction or self-medication or whatever). What difference does it make whether they diagnosed themselves by browsing symptoms on wikipedia or using an advanced diagnosis AI on their phone?

Re: Ask HN: What medical datasets do you need?

#65

Post by TuringNYC »

I wont comment on what, but on how:

- If the datasets are imaging, there should be enough per class for typical ML techniques. Otherwise you just get people over-fitting models on sets of 500 images and the illusion of progress.

- I'm quite happy with the Kaggle datasets generally, but why do others make consuming data so difficult. Heck, if we've already received the data, lets just take it the last mile and make it consumable with obvious labeling, standard formats, etc. This is such a pet peeve of mine that -- if you need help taking datasets to the last mile -- i'm volunteering, ask me to help make it presentable. Ideally it should be pull-able via curl/etc, unzippable and be able to get into a pipeline w/o manual effort.

Re: Ask HN: What medical datasets do you need?

#66

Post by intended »

swalsh wrote: post #40
rafinha wrote: post #4

I'm not sure such thing exists: "large companies with lots of medical data". Medical data is often confidential and belong to hospitals.

I've worked in a large company that has "lots of medical data" which we used for analytics purposes. What we would do is "Anonymize" the data. Unfortunately that's a pretty herculean task.

What's involved? It sounds fun.

Re: Ask HN: What medical datasets do you need?

#68

Post by angersock »

So, the last startup I was a fulltime engineer at actually worked in this area.

What I would suggest to be maximally useful would be to focus on physiological data: EKG/ECG, EMG, glucose, SPO2, maybe various blood work counts.

All of those are data that are both well-understood and are thrown away regularly, and that if fed into a computer with modern ML methods we could maybe see some really cool stuff.

I'd suggest staying away from unstructured data and things that are primarily of interest to only the business side of healthcare--insurance figures, billing codes, EMR/EHR shit.

If you really wanted to get in there, putting up a minimal and standardized format for representing labs and medications would go a looooong way.

~

The problem in healthcare isn't the medical stuff--it's that people get bogged down in the inefficiencies of the system and zoom off solving problems that are removed from the immediate task of "what the fuck is wrong with this patient from the instruments I have at hand?"

Re: Ask HN: What medical datasets do you need?

#69

Post by staticmalloc »

fratlas wrote: post #37
Entangled wrote: post #28

Dermatology, eye conditions, blood cells, tissue, viruses, urine, saliva, everything that can allow an app to give you a first diagnose before heading to the doctor. I foresee in less than ten years we will have a doctor in our pockets. No, it won't cure us and it won't replace a doctor, but it will give us all the information we need to have a 99% certainty of our condition. -- Second batch for animals and their con…

While I think it'll happen eventually, medicine is not at all black and white. Anecdotal, but I had a suspicious mole looked at, the doctor couldn't decide, got a second opinion from their colleague, he still was only 90% sure. And that's a relatively simple example. Doctors are some of the smartest/hard working people in society, and if they can still make mistakes, medical-grade AI is a long way off.

"Medical-grade AI" has been possible for some diagnosing tasks since 1968. A simple linear model that takes in some features from an X-ray was able to outperform the best doctor in one study: https://goo.gl/yMP7sU

Re: Ask HN: What medical datasets do you need?

#70

Post by PostOnce »

Anonymized patient records, preferrably with information about the doctor performing the diagnosis as well. I've only been able to find small datasets of some tens of thousands of records, I would like tens of millions. You can't learn much from what amounts to one small town's medical records, in terms of finding accurate diagnoses, or identify places and situations that result in better doctors.
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