Cancer Healthcare IT Information

Will a robot conduct your next cancer screening?

Machine learning programs have made dramatic steps in recent years.  For instance, AlphaGo beat a world champion Go player recently.  Playing games is great, but can machine learning improve health care?  Science Daily reports that machine learning algorithms may help improve cancer screening accuracy.

Every state in the United States requires cancer cases to be reported to statewide cancer registries for disease tracking, identification of at-risk populations, and recognition of unusual trends or clusters. Typically, however, busy health care providers submit cancer reports to equally busy public health departments months into the course of a patient’s treatment rather than at the time of initial diagnosis…

The Regenstrief Institute and IU researchers have demonstrated that machine learning can greatly facilitate the process, by automatically and quickly extracting crucial meaning from plaintext, also known as free-text, pathology reports, and using them for decision-making…

“We think that its no longer necessary for humans to spend time reviewing text reports to determine if cancer is present or not,” said study senior author Shaun Grannis, M.D., M.S., interim director of the Regenstrief Center of Biomedical Informatics. “We have come to the point in time that technology can handle this. A human’s time is better spent helping other humans by providing them with better clinical care.”

The study was published in the Journal of Biomedical Informatics this month.  We may not be at the stage where you will be visiting robots instead of doctors at a physician’s office, but the progress is progressing.

 

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