I have for long wondered about the relevance of datamining in medical diagnosis. Think about what a doctor does: Collects data by examination of the patient, through pathological and radiographic tests and on the basis of these data points, makes an inference or diagnosis about the ailment inflicting the patient. So much in common to the basic tenets of datamining!
I got a first glimpse of this about 4 years back during the 2006 KDD CUP related to Pulmonary Embolism sponsored by Siemens. The focus of the competition was to assist in automated detection of the disease, with separate problems related to false positives and false negatives. The Holy Grail of the competition was an algorithm to predict with 100% certainty if a patient was healthy!
The 2008 KDD CUP competition again was again related to this area but dealt with breast cancer.
It seems , like everything else in analytics, IBM is dabbling in this space as well. Check out this very interesting article in the Atlantic. As the article indicates, a big hurdle here is to get the practitioners to embrace the technology.
-- datamining_guy
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