I had my second interview yesterday afternoon for a new, and rather prestigious research position. There were 86 applicants and it is down to the final two. The main research project is building models of the human brain using artificial intelligence towards the diagnosis and treatment of neurological injury and disease. However, the job also requires me to be the consulting technical expert on artificial intelligence to the university. I’ll get to be involved in dozens of different research projects! Some of the projects they’ve told me about already are very exciting and could save a lot of lives. For example, reducing surgical error using artificial intelligence.
Now, I must simply (ha! yeah right, simply ummmm no) wait for an answer. I really hope I get this job. This could be both career-defining and allow me to really impact a lot of lives in a meaningful way.
Are there currently any decent expert systems that accept basic patient data (age, sex, height, weight, pulse, blood pressure, respiration, temperature, …), symptoms, and previous test results, and output useful information like potential diagnoses and further tests, recommended treatments, stuff to watch out for, and so on, to reduce potential errors as you said, or catch rare conditions?
There are, and they are decent in the sense of duplicating what doctors already did by looking at accumulated data. The advances will be made with the great increase of data now available in real time and finding the less obvious correlations in the data. It doesn’t require heavy duty intelligence for that purpose in general medicine though, it is areas like neurology and the use of modeling that the OP mentioned that need the benefit of heavy analysis.
ETA: Congrats BeepKillBeep, sounds like great fun.
Wow, that’s great, BKB. The Dope is honored and embiggened by your presence. If you choose to not post here much in coming months and years, we’ll obviously understand it’s because you’re devoting your skills and time to amazing, important work.