Live data from Hacker News

Google Is Training Machines to Predict When a Patient Will Die

bloomberg.com

1–10 of 87 posts

Re: Google Is Training Machines to Predict When a Patient Will Die

#4
I would feel quite unconfortable if every action taken (or not taken) by medic staff has to be second-guessed simply because there are financial incentives derived from this research.

Customer A does not receive full medical support because "he's dying anyway"?

Is there a way to ensure that such cruel use of the research is prohibited?

Re: Google Is Training Machines to Predict When a Patient Will Die

#5
As much as 80 percent of the time spent on today’s predictive models goes to the “scut work” of making the data presentable, said Nigam Shah, an associate professor at Stanford University, who co-authored Google’s research paper, published in the journal Nature. Google’s approach avoids this. "You can throw in the kitchen sink and not have to worry about it,” Shah said.

Alarm bells start ringing right about here.

A solid 90% of AI is data munging, so that work isn't going away even a little bit; historically, Google throwing the kitchen sink into healthcare problems with lots of noisy data leads to flu seasons being correlated with softball victories or other wildly spurious correlations.

Re: Google Is Training Machines to Predict When a Patient Will Die

#7
A very close relative of mine passed away 2 weeks ago. She had cancer for 2 years and when she was first diagnosed the doctors would give her 8-10 “good years”. Well...

When she died, I was shocked to learn that very few data points of her sichkness and treatment history would be preserved for later analysis. Doctors work almost entirely on their gut feeling and probably some clinical studies with n being very small. I hate that she died, but it’s even worse to know that all her data died with her and won’t help any other patient. I think this is one of the rare cases where collecting more data would help protect people

Re: Google Is Training Machines to Predict When a Patient Will Die

#8
post #7

A very close relative of mine passed away 2 weeks ago. She had cancer for 2 years and when she was first diagnosed the doctors would give her 8-10 “good years”. Well... When she died, I was shocked to learn that very few data points of her sichkness and treatment history would be preserved for later analysis. Doctors work almost entirely on their gut feeling and probably some clinical studies with n being very small.…

I'm sorry to hear about your loss, but can you elaborate on what data was discarded after her passing?

Re: Google Is Training Machines to Predict When a Patient Will Die

#9
post #2

> Google’s system even showed which records led it to conclusions. What if the system points out that the particular doctors which appear in the records are the culprit?

Uncomfortable, but over all a good thing as long as the system uses this information properly; offering doctors additional supportive training, if appropriate. (And not forgetting that the doctors with the the worst recovery rates may be the ones predisposed to take the trickiest cases).

Re: Google Is Training Machines to Predict When a Patient Will Die

#10
post #7

A very close relative of mine passed away 2 weeks ago. She had cancer for 2 years and when she was first diagnosed the doctors would give her 8-10 “good years”. Well... When she died, I was shocked to learn that very few data points of her sichkness and treatment history would be preserved for later analysis. Doctors work almost entirely on their gut feeling and probably some clinical studies with n being very small.…

I'm sorry to hear about your loss, but can you elaborate on what data was discarded after her passing?

Thank you. Well, the way I understand it: her treatment history won’t be considered by any other doctor than her own. The reason for that is that she wasn’t part of a proper medical study.

However, I believe there is value in her data. The last days she was treated with an experimental drug. If there was an open database on all cases with treatment history I could have looked into that and get a feeling what to expect. These things often come with huge side effects, so you want to do it only if there is a slight chance.

Also, if this data was collected globally, the number of reference cases would be much larger.

Post reply on HN