AI can predict heart attacks more accurately than doctors

AI can predict heart attacks more accurately than doctors
engadget.com

> Four machine-learning algorithms (random forest, logistic regression, gradient boosting machines, neural networks) were compared to an established algorithm (American College of Cardiology guidelines) to predict first cardiovascular event over 10-years

So, routine learning algorithms were applied to a task and performed better than the simplified (for simple computation) results of a prior learning algorithm.

What the authors showed is that by training standard machine learning algorithms (random forests, logistic regression, gradient boosting, and a shallow neural net) on readily-available signals from the medical record (e.g., prior diagnoses), you can increase the c-statistic from 0.728 to 0.764. These machine learning techniques are well-suited to the data set and the empirical evaluation is strong, so this work should really stand on its own without trying to brand it AI.

There is some very high quality work on artificial intelligence in medicine being done today. Google Brain published a validation study of a convolutional net to diagnose diabetic retinopathy in December, and Stanford published similar work but applied to skin cancer. NIPS 2016 had an excellent Machine Learning for Health workshop with several works-in-progress: http://www.nipsml4hc.ws/

The most blatent example, though not the only one, is when I spent months and thousands of dollars (with the help of my insurance company) chasing a problem in my SI joint. Four different physical therapists kept telling me I had referred pain from my spine. This is based on the fact that I felt the pain if I raised my leg when I was lying down. That seems like a pretty poor test. Any other doctor or physical therapist that actually looked at my SI joint said I had an inflammed SI joint problem. The problem turned out to be my hip muscles would get tight when I slept on my side.

I would guess the main problem is not the doctors themselves but the administration that doesn't trust the doctors to use their brains. If that is true, it is not silly that the AI result beat the simple test. Hopefully either they will start using better tests of trust doctors a little more to think on their own.