Symptoma – Digital health assistant and symptom checker
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Re: Symptoma – Digital health assistant and symptom checker
#2This is really cool.
I wish there were something like this for blood work results- type in your blood work (and any symptoms) and it recognizes which values are too high or too low and indicates what might be the causes.
Re: Symptoma – Digital health assistant and symptom checker
#3An expert system, very refreshing in this era of ML.
Brings back memories of uni.
Re: Symptoma – Digital health assistant and symptom checker
#4An expert system, very refreshing in this era of ML. Brings back memories of uni.
Or THX-1138 ("What's wrong?")
Re: Symptoma – Digital health assistant and symptom checker
#5500 - internal server error.
Yes, it certainly fits my symptoms. Impressive deduction.
Re: Symptoma – Digital health assistant and symptom checker
#6I was playing around with doing this from Wikidata and made a basic POC.
There are some limitations in expression there, new properties are needed to better express symptoms locality and severity, like pain in the head, pain in the arm, pain in the stomach.
Data quality is not that great, better pipelines are needed from sources to extract symtoms and locality.
What I did on wikidata is extract all valid symptom items with SPARQL, and then allowed the user to select from this and then selected items with these as symptoms again using SPARQL.
It mostly came up with some radiation poisoning because the symptoms for those conditions are quite broad (e.g. pain, fever, vomiting) and there are many variations of radiation poisoning on Wikidata. But I also did not spend that much time on it.
But ultimately this is a problem best solved by Semantic Technology and the majority of challenges are solved once you have a good ontology and good data matching that ontology in RDF. Then the questions can be expressed as simple SPARQL queries and a much better UI can be made where you don't have to rely on NLP.
EDIT: some causality may also useful to exclude radiation poisoning, like saying the condition is preceded by exposure to radiation exposure so that users can then say they did not have exposure to radiation. This may already be supported by some wikidata properties.
Re: Symptoma – Digital health assistant and symptom checker
#7This is really cool. I wish there were something like this for blood work results- type in your blood work (and any symptoms) and it recognizes which values are too high or too low and indicates what might be the causes.
You can easily make this with OWL, RDF and SPARQL (i.e. Semantic Web Technology). There may actually already be ontologies in OWL to express something like this in which case all you need is the actual data, but that may also already exist. Maybe start at https://www.w3.org/wiki/Ontology_Dowsing
EDIT: A more domain specific starting point for Biology may be http://www.ontobee.org/ where you can search in ontologies from http://www.obofoundry.org/ (The Open Biological and Biomedical Ontology (OBO) Foundry). There may be other similar things also related to biology but OBO Foundry is pretty popular and big.
Re: Symptoma – Digital health assistant and symptom checker
#8It's a cool project. I've used an app called "Ada" before and it's a very similar concept.
However, I just made a try with some symptoms I've had last week of what was probably a common cold and I ended up with a long list of diseases, ranging from multiple sclerosis and other rare diseases, along with that common cold, but presented with no likelihood order. Also, no warning were displayed.
I think this is quite dangerous as many people who will use such service have a tendency to hypochondria, to present them with such a long list of rare diseases because of a symptom related keyword present somewhere.
Re: Symptoma – Digital health assistant and symptom checker
#9I put in the following symptoms:
> dry cough, fever, aching limbs
The first result is "Sacoidosis"
"Common cold" is the 4th result. Sarcoidosis is around 25k cases per year in the US. Common cold is some hundreds of million cases in the US per year (on average an adult has 2 - 3 cases per year alone, children even more).
This is dangerous. People will misinterpret the result ordering - esp. as the page tells me it has 84% confidence. This will get misrepresented in a lot of minds.
Maybe one should use data on number of cases per year for ordering - like many doctors (I know) actually do in their heads when listening to symptoms.
Re: Symptoma – Digital health assistant and symptom checker
#10Really cool. Especially the reference to literature in the differential diagnosis tab. Since the suggested diagnoses are based on case reports, I suspect they are quite biased towards rare diseases and unusual presentations.
One annoying bug: I could not submit 'No' as an answer. It seems to be too short. 'No,' works.