Amazon Comprehend Medical Uses ML to Process Unstructured Medical Text

[cageymaru]

Amazon AWS has announced Amazon Comprehend Medical to leverage the power of its new HIPAA-eligible Machine Learning expertise to perform medical language processing on unstructured medical text to identify information such as patient diagnosis, treatments, dosages, symptoms and signs, and more. This will allow health care providers, insurers, researchers, and clinical trial investigators as well as health care IT, biotech, and pharmaceutical companies to improve clinical decision support and clinical trials management.

Amazon has been working closely with Seattle's Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center to identify patients for clinical trials who may benefit from specific cancer therapies. The Amazon Comprehend Medical system can evaluate "millions of clinical notes to extract and index medical conditions, medications, and choice of cancer therapeutic options, reducing the time to process each document from hours, to seconds."

"Curing cancer is, inherently, an issue of time," said Matthew Trunnell, Chief Information Officer, Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. "For cancer patients and the researchers dedicated to curing them, time is the limiting resource. The process of developing clinical trials and connecting them with the right patients requires research teams to sift through and label mountains of unstructured medical record data. Amazon Comprehend Medical will reduce this time burden from hours per record to seconds. This is a vital step toward getting researchers rapid access to the information they need when they need it so they can find actionable insights to advance lifesaving therapies for patients."

 

[sfsuphysics]

Kind of creeped out by Amazon's logo, like a "trust us we know what's best for you" smile

 

[nutzo]

I'm sorry, but the computer says that is not the correct treatment for your condition.
We have to proceed with the amputation to fix you nose bleed.

 

[Tweak42]

Double bladed battle axe.
On one hand there's an overwhelming amount of medical data that needs to be analyzed to find the best treatment. It would take a team of trained scientist years to sift through to find nuggets of relevant data that ML could potentially find much faster.
On the other hand there's much potential of abuse of this data by humans for exploitative purposes on groups of persons.

 

[Wiffle]

This is quite possibly the greatest invention since sliced bread.

It solves the biggest medical issue to date: Reading doctors orders... cause lord knows I can't read that sloppy handwriting.

 

[katanaD]

It solves the biggest medical issue to date: Reading doctors orders... cause lord knows I can't read that sloppy handwriting.

thats no joke. the wife has to read the charts to code them for billing. they write as bad as i do. LOL

On the other hand there's much potential of abuse of this data by humans for exploitative purposes on groups of persons.

yeah i can completely see you go into the dr for "internal bowel issues" and then suddenly on your phone and websurfing you are getting AD's for imodium or the like