Machine Learning in Rheumatology: Going Beyond Clinical Instincts

"Oh right, it's medicine, not science." That's what a dear scientist friend said to me once as we were discussing our research involving my patients.

Karmela Kim Chan, MD

I think instinct plays a role in how we practice medicine. Before you dismiss this idea as unscientific, hear me out: Although we may not always know how to articulate what we know or how we know it, instinct is actually informed by our experiences superimposed on the background of medical training.

But each of us, alone, has incomplete data and insufficient time.

This seems to me to be the essence of machine learning — imagine each individual practitioner, with all the discrete data points gathered, consciously or otherwise, from each patient encounter multiplied by a thousand, or tens of thousands. Imagine having that massive amount of information to leverage for the next patient to benefit from. Artificial intelligence is exactly that — it would recognize patterns that you might not otherwise recognize if you relied only on your small population size. Rajkomar and colleagues, in a review article in The New England Journal of Medicine,describe it thus "Machine learning… is the fundamental technology required to meaningfully process data that exceed the capacity of the human brain to comprehend."