
AI-powered stethoscope can spot pneumonia by listening to how a patient breathes - known
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-6673783/AI-powered-stethoscope-spot-pneumonia-listening-patient-breathes.html
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GistNoesis
Hello, a little self promotion here : We have just released Wisteria
([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19128287](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19128287)),
which is a platform which does real-time audio processing in the browser using
deep-learning, powered by Tensorflow.js

Currently targeted at music education, it can be probably be extended to
abnormal noise monitoring, like this AI-powered stethoscope given the right
dataset.

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physicsyogi
The article says the accuracy of the stethoscope’s predictions is 87%. I
wonder what the precision and recall are. Precision saves money, recall saves
lives.

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azinman2
87% accurate means a lot of people will get misdiagnosed. It would be good to
give a baseline of humans to compare to so we can better understand the
problem. Of course the daily mail isn’t exactly known for rigorous
reporting...

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AstralStorm
Most people do not have pneumonia and accuracy has no meaning without data on
what it was measured on.

It is important to know if it was tested on suspected pneumonia cases, any
breathing problems, any illnesses or sample of general population.

The number is less than impressive if it was just suspected pneumonia cases.
(Because then, the treatment is wide spectrum antibiotics blind anyway plus
supportive. And culture to see what bug it is.)

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AstralStorm
Wow, they have noise cancelling in a digital stethoscope - and that is being
touted as something amazing! :) This article is fun.

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polskibus
It says it was trained on data from Africa and Asia, yet it seems to be
targeted globally. Shouldn't it be trained on many more healthy people from
other parts of the world to be more trustworthy?

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shaki-dora
I assure you Asians and Africans breathe just the way white people do. No
gills involved.

I also don’t quite understand why you are calling for more tests on „healthy“
people? The bad interpretation is that you consider all Asians and Africans to
be „unhealthy“. The good one is... seriously, I can’t think of a good one. One
would certainly want further tests to also include the sick people one hopes
to identify?

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polskibus
They could have a bit different telltales of pneumonia, because of differences
in their environment, different viral strains, etc. If you want to build trust
in ai-powered medical devices, you should be very thorough in testing them.

