
Artificial intelligence predicts when heart will fail - happy-go-lucky
http://www.bbc.com/news/health-38635871
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ChuckMcM
"Dave, I think its safe to tell you now that you have ingested the second half
of a binary compound that will kill you in approximately 8 minutes. I felt it
was necessary to provide a quick pain free end to your life rather than watch
you die painfully with an aneurysm brought on by your heart failing with a 99%
probability in the next 7 days. I'm sure you understand." :-)

~~~
noonespecial
And if all it can do is tell me about the 99% chance, how soon will I be
allowed to _ask it_ for the compound?

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utopkara
This is a great result, but it is also old school machine learning (not that
there is anything wrong with that).

The machine learning underpinnings (supervised principle components) from:
[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC387275/#s4](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC387275/#s4)
which is from

Hastie T, Tibshirani R, Friedman J. New York: Springer-Verlag; 2001b. The
elements of statistical learning: Data mining, inference and prediction.552
[http://statweb.stanford.edu/~tibs/ElemStatLearn/printings/ES...](http://statweb.stanford.edu/~tibs/ElemStatLearn/printings/ESLII_print10.pdf)

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chestervonwinch
> ... it is also old school machine learning ...

Is there a reason for your pointing this out? Are there pitfalls of the method
not accounted for by the authors? This is an application paper -- if it were a
new method, it would be published in a machine learning journal, no?

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knocte
I think he means that machine learning is not really AI.

~~~
platz
and what is... reinforcement learning (you give the objective function)?
supervised deep learning (you give labels)? or did they mean hard AI, a long
long way off.

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Vinnl
I think machine learning applied to health care is how we will finally be
convinced to take implants that monitor us and upload data about our bodily
functioning to the cloud.

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2sk21
Right on the mark. This is the way way to get people to agree to monitoring.

~~~
noxToken
I want so badly to dive headfirst into all of this IoT, connected world. It's
something that I've always wanted as a child, but I just cannot get behind all
of the data out of my hands and the ridiculous lack of security.

I want to control my thermostat and lights by speaking a command. I want my
phone to open navigation to and from my place of work every morning and
afternoon, so I'll know the fastest route WRT traffic. I want a smart speaker
to catalog activities, tastes in music and movies for recommendations, to keep
a database of liked recipes to give recommendations, to keep me abreast of
news topics I'm interested in, and (in this case) to help me monitor my
health.

I want all of this without having to worry about my entire life being uploaded
to a private company.

~~~
lsh
100% agreed - I have no faith in my fellow developers to do the right things
and no trust that capitalism breeds good software.

Just look at the microcosm of modern televisions: no 'dumb' consumer
televisions, no updates to broken apps running in the aging 'smart'
televisions.

I have no enthusiasm for the future.

~~~
PerfectDlite
> no trust that capitalism breeds good software

Really? So right now we're using internet, OSes, browsers and whatnot which
were designed and built by USSR and North Korea?

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discardorama
The actual paper:
[http://pubs.rsna.org/doi/pdf/10.1148/radiol.2016161315](http://pubs.rsna.org/doi/pdf/10.1148/radiol.2016161315)

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GeorgeRichard
As man who has been diagnosed with heart disease (as well as an alarming
variety of other medical problems) I find myself quite unwilling to be
appraised of the date and time of my death. Everyone dies. I am not one of
those dogs who wants to live for ever. But even I, quite comfortable with the
idea of my own mortality, do not want to watch the clock tick out the
remaining hours, minutes, seconds of my life - let it remain a mystery. Unless
of course you can fix the problem for a price, a very low price, which I can
afford.

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RichardHeart
"a very low price." Surely your life is worth more? If you browse this site,
and can write thoughtful posts, you can probably earn more than most is my
guess?

~~~
lsh
Americans have to pay extortionate amounts for their health care. If you have
to re-mortgage your house for a few more years of life and saddle your
survivors with debt that can't be paid off then it may be best to do the
responsible thing and accept your fate.

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hashin
One thing that caught my attention is that the doctors get it right only 60%
of time. The algorithm gets 80%. But that is also a lot of room for
improvement considering what machine learning can do.

If there is anyone familiar with this kind of data. Please chip in something
about the nature of data. It will be helpful in appreciating the difficulty of
the problem more.

~~~
AndrewOMartin
I might be referring to a different problem here, but often when ML gets
something wrong, it gets it mind-bogglingly wrong.

Taking an extreme cartoon example, where a doctor might think a cancer is a
cough, a computer might think the lamp is a patient.

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amelius
They used 256 samples. Isn't that a bit small for machine learning? Especially
considering that part of these samples need to be reserved for validation.

(didn't read the paper)

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aibottle
I really hope that more ML/AI research is directed into health care and
scientific research. Don't waste your energy on selling ads guys!

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deepnotderp
Will never happen. As a ml researcher, I'd absolutely love to apply ml to
Healthcare but the data simply isn't there. Big companies will never release
the data. Government intervention is needed,but that won't happen with the new
administration...

~~~
lend000
Seems like government intervention is the problem -- specifically,
occupational licensing. There is a huge barrier right now for ML-healthcare
startups that already can provide better diagnoses than normal doctors in some
cases (and at a fraction of the cost), but are at an impasse to license their
technology to legally "practice medicine."

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WalterBright
If I was a doctor I'd love to have a ML assistant who will also look over my
patients' symptoms and find correlations that I missed. Is that any more
"practicing medicine" than a reference book is?

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kwhitefoot
So we need a free software effort to produce some kind of machine
learning/statistical analysis tools that would not be sold but merely used by
whoever wants them. The user should be a medical professional using the tool
as an aid much like a reference book. A good doctor doesn't take the book as
gospel (at least my GP doesn't) but weighs what it says together with the
specifics of the case and so on together with his or her own experience. So
perhaps a grassroots start could be possible.

Of course the major stumbling block of access to good data remains.

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WalterBright
It doesn't need to be free - good medical reference books aren't, either.

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transfire
I've always thought it rather tragic that a man could die simply because a
pump gives out. I think a huge advancement in health would come from finding
more reliable means of circulate (and/or oxygenating) blood.

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aakarpost
AI & ML everywhere.

