Diagnosis Without Doctors: Could PCs Replace GPs?

Computers may not have much by way of bedside manner, but they can carry out tasks human doctors can’t, processing gigabytes of data for a more personalized diagnosis.

Predicting ambulance demand

Big data can also predict patient numbers in the first place. Ambulance demand is rising across Hong Kong, but it varies from day to day. To find out why, Dr. Ho Ting Wong from the University of Hong Kong analyzed six million emergency records.

“A huge amount of patient records have already been collected by hospitals during patients’ emergency room journeys. There are unlimited ways to analyze this big data,” he shared with Asian Scientist Magazine.

As a health geographer, Wong’s first instinct was to check the weather. He compared the records with the daily temperature and humidity readings over three years. The verdict: call-outs increase when the city gets too hot. Temperature was the single most important factor affecting ambulance call-out rates, accounting for 49 percent of daily variation. But would the analysis work the other way around?

Wong built a computer model which predicts ambulance demand indirectly, by analyzing seven-day weather forecasts. Taking the weather into account improved the accuracy of ambulance demand forecasts by an average of 33 percent.

“In the past, hospitals could only plan ahead for future emergency admissions based on staff experience,” he explained.

With every click, the world’s data pool is expanding faster than we can comprehend. From Watson, the supercomputer taught to diagnose cancer by IBM, to an app which uses social media posts of overflowing gutters to predict malaria outbreaks, big data is transforming healthcare across the globe.

We may be heading for a future in which artificial intelligence has replaced doctors, and health problems can be predicted years in advance. Who knows what’s next?


This article was first published in the print version of Asian Scientist Magazine, July 2016.

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Copyright: Asian Scientist Magazine. Photo: Shutterstock.

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Zaria Gorvett is a freelance science writer based in the UK. She graduated with a bachelors degree in biological science from the University of Exeter, UK and a masters degree in medical microbiology from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, UK.

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