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Medicine and Health Care as a Data Problem: Will Computers Become Better Medical Doctors?

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 8700))

Abstract

Modern medicine and health care in all parts of our world are facing formidable challenges: exploding costs, finite resources, aging population as well as deluge of big complex, high-dimensional data sets produced by modern biomedical science, which exceeds the absorptive capacity of human minds. Consequently, the question arises about whether and to what extent the advances of machine intelligence and computational power may be utilized to mitigate the consequences. After prevailing over humans in chess and popular game shows, it is postulated that the biomedical field will be the next domain in which smart computing systems will outperform their human counterparts. In this overview we examine this hypothesis by comparing data formats, data access and heuristic methods used by both humans and computer systems in the medical decision making process. We conclude that the medical reasoning process can be significantly enhanced using emerging smart computing technologies and so-called computational intelligence. However, as humans have access to a larger spectrum of data of higher complexity and continue to perform essential components of the reasoning process more efficiently, it would be unwise to sacrifice the whole human practice of medicine to the digital world; hence a major goal is to mutually exploit the best of the two worlds: We need computational intelligence to deal with big complex data, but we nevertheless – and more than ever before – need human intelligence to interpret abstracted data and information and creatively make decisions.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Duke University Hospital, 40 Duke Medicine Circle, Durham, NC, 27710, USA

    Michael Duerr-Specht

  2. Department of Computing Science, University of Alberta, 2-21 Athabasca Hall, Edmonton, AB, Canada

    Randy Goebel

  3. Institute for Medical Informatics, Statistics and Documentation, Medical University Graz, Auenbruggerplatz 2/V, 8036, Graz, Austria

    Andreas Holzinger

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  1. Michael Duerr-Specht
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  2. Randy Goebel
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Correspondence to Michael Duerr-Specht .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Research Unit HCI-KDD, Medical University of Graz, Graz, Austria

    Andreas Holzinger

  2. Industrial HCI Research Lab, Fraunhofer Institute, Lemgo, Germany

    Carsten Röcker

  3. Human-Computer Interaction Center, RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, Germany

    Martina Ziefle

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Duerr-Specht, M., Goebel, R., Holzinger, A. (2015). Medicine and Health Care as a Data Problem: Will Computers Become Better Medical Doctors?. In: Holzinger, A., Röcker, C., Ziefle, M. (eds) Smart Health. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 8700. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-16226-3_2

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