March 16, 2016
...AND CHEAPER...:
The Artificially Intelligent Doctor Will Hear You Now : U.K.-based startup Babylon will launch an app later this year that will listen to your symptoms and provide medical advice. Will it help or hinder the health-care system? (Simon Parkin March 9, 2016, MIT Technology Review)
There are about 10,000 known human diseases, yet human doctors are only able to recall a fraction of them at any given moment. As many as 40,500 patients die annually in an ICU in the U.S. as a result of misdiagnosis, according to a 2012 Johns Hopkins study. British entrepreneur Ali Parsa believes that artificial intelligence can help doctors avoid these mistakes.Parsa is the founder and CEO of Babylon, a U.K.-based subscription health service that plans to launch an AI-based app designed to improve doctors' hit rate. Users will report the symptoms of their illness to the app, which will check them against a database of diseases using speech recognition. After taking into account the patient's history and circumstances, Babylon will offer an appropriate course of action. Currently in beta testing, the app is expected to be available later this year.The concept is comparable to IBM's Watson computer, which is currently in use by oncologists at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York. IBM's software draws from 600,000 medical evidence reports, 1.5 million patient records and clinical trials, and two million pages of text from medical journals to help doctors develop treatment plans tailored to patients' individual symptoms, genetics, and histories.Babylon uses a similar network of databases, though they cover illnesses beyond cancer. The system is able to analyze "hundreds of millions of combinations of symptoms" in real time, Parsa says, taking into account individualized information on the patient's genetics, environment, behavior, and biology.
Posted by Orrin Judd at March 16, 2016 3:52 AM