Whiz Kids / Helping novice physicians

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Whiz Kids / Helping novice physicians

Every person who has ever been sick - meaning everyone - knows that there are good doctors, and doctors who are not as good. In cases of complex illnesses, there will likely be a vast difference between the treatment given by an experienced physician and that offered by a novice. In his doctoral thesis, which he completed this year, Dr. Ronen Tal-Botzer, from Bar-Ilan University created a computer program that studies the decisions made by good physicians and can use that information to help inexperienced physicians make correct treatment decisions. "The question I asked is whether it is possible to create an artificial intelligence system that can learn the considerations on which physicians base their decisions," Tal explains. The work was done under the supervision of Prof. Avidan Neumann, from the Faculty of Life Sciences at Bar-Ilan. After creating the appropriate program, Tal fed it decisions, considerations and data about treatment administered by dozens of leading physicians who deal with serious viral diseases, such as AIDS and Hepatitis C. The program also absorbs biological information. With its powers of calculation, the system is capable of understanding decisions that even the physician himself cannot explain. "The physician may say: 'I believe there is a certain parameter that is important, but I cannot explain the factors that led me to decide on it.' The system will learn what led the physician to decide on one occasion that a certain parameter is at this level, while on another occasion it is at a different level," Tal says. After the system learns the decisions, it can replicate them and analyze the patient's condition, "as though it is a medical specialist," Tal notes. The program was recently tried out in Europe on patients suffering from Hepatitis C. The results of the patients' long-term blood tests were fed into the computer, which recommended treatment. "The experiment was very successful," Tal reports. "The system sometimes made mistakes, but compared to the number of mistakes a novice physician makes, the computer made fewer mistakes."

The possibility is now being examined of developing a commercial product from Tal's program, for use in regions of the world where the level of medical care is low. "You can send a program like this to Africa. The physician there will feed it blood tests and receive a detailed analysis of the desirable treatment, based on the considerations of senior physicians. That will accord the physicians there far better analytical capabilities than they have from their training."

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/939087.html