Medicine and Technology

One of the reasons I'm so interested in the intersection of medicine and technology is because most of my friends back home are studying to be Doctors. It's not only fun picking on them, it's also interesting to analyze how technology can completely redefine medicine with the same impact it has had on other industries. Not that it hasn't happened yet! It has just not been the curve-jumping paradigm shift we've imagined for a while. Consider the evolving surgical landscape where technology has immediate and obvious implications. We're now getting to the point where brain surgery (arguably the most intensive and sensitive of them all) could be aided by the help of robots like neuroArm. However, the control is still in the hands of a surgeon and for good reason. The disruptive force I'm looking for is when robots will perform such operations completely autonomously or at least with minimal human supervision.

Heh! Turns out this is one of the most difficult problems in science. We would need robots to perceive the world (or at least a part of it) in much the same way humans do. In a Computer Vision & Image Processing course I took in university, the lecturer put it best: "The objective of this course is not to teach you how computers can be taught to 'see'. It is to understand how infinitely complex our vision and processing aparatus is whilst so second-nature and involuntary to us. And we would also need an inference engine (or some A.I.) strong enough to make complex decisions. It's this aspect of technology in medicine that I've always been interested in.

In university, we did some basic projects involving inference engines. I came out with a Knowledge-Based System (KBS) for teaching that would not be domain-specific. In essence, we were trying to accomplish a 'weak' system within the confines of a 'strong' one. You might think that's impossible (or crude) but well, it was all about experimentation. Someday when I have enough time, I'll put it up as an online Intelligent Tutoring System. The point in this post, however, is this: domain-specific KBS's have been shown to be effective in medical diagnostics. I wonder why we don't have more startups etc investigating this field. At the very least, such systems could help Doctors diagnose more effectively and efficiently. I know this is not an easy task, that's why I'm not calling out for fully-automated diagnostic systems. To put it smiply, more effective systems to serve as reference engines for today's Doctors. How about that?

There's also the human-aspect in this change. When a human life is at stake, we'd rather a human expert in charge. How many of you would be comfortable with autonomous robots performing surgeries? We've seen technological blunders in mission critical systems, can we afford a blunder in life critical situations? How about our confidence in Doctors who rely on the above-mentioned diagnostic systems? Problem is, we'll never find out if we never try. And if we gain a vantage point where robots are a lot more successful than the best human doctors out there, I can't imagine how much we would've evolved.

permalink 1 comments

1 Comments:

"....most of my friends back home are studying to be Doctors...."

Then what happened to you? Why are you such a needy, insecure cry baby? Why did your friends go on to successful careers while you continue to plague us all with crap and trash?
Were you not good enough?

By  John Smith, at April 30, 2007 7:14 AM 

Post a Comment