Ways data science and technology make doctors, super-doctors?

What is data science and technology?

Data science & technology is a specialized field of study related to scientific procedures & systems to gather, extract knowledge or data insights in a wide range of formats which can be either organized or unorganized. It has a lot of similarities to data mining. It is a concept that integrates statistics, data analysis & other such processes for the comprehension and analysis of actual happenings or phenomena with that of data or information. It utilises methods & theories taken from many fields of study which include the important aspects of Mathematics, Statistics, Computer Science etc, particularly from the areas of machine learning, classification, cluster analysis, data mining, databases and visualization. It is changing the way medical science operates and has the capacity to take the efficiency of doctors and medical professionals to a whole new and hitherto unimaginable level.

From doctors to super doctors? How can it be possible?

Data science and AI technology can rightly be called the future of medical science and healthcare. The reason for this is that the way doctors function will never be the same again because of AI technology. Some of the ways by which doctors can actually enhance their operational efficiencies manifold with the help of data science & AI technology are discussed below:

1. 1.  According to a finding, doctors often make a diagnosis of their patient in the first 30 seconds of observation, when a patient visits his doctor's chamber complaining of some ailments, the doctor conducts an overall medical examination which includes Temperature, Pulse rate, BP etc & the diagnosis is made based on a gut instinct or reaction to the symptoms that are visible & are disclosed. Such medical care is much more biased on viewpoints than actually valid information because a majority of the decisions are made on the basis of the doctor's viewpoint instead of a scientifically verified truth and those measurements which are taken at one particular moment are prone to errors. Doctors, after all, are human beings.

1. 1. In the present scenario, the information which is gathered in a visit to a doctor is only a very minute percentage of it. If health is perceived as a data problem, the doctors would require an altogether different skill set in order to perform effective analysis of the data. Most of the doctors agree that the medical science is presently based mostly on a procedure of trial and error, along with professional viewpoints. This is where data science and technology comes in. It will change the current trend of treatment by intuition and viewpoints to that backed by scientifically proven information.

1. 1. Gathering information with the help of data science, technology and successful application of that information to provide effective solutions to health problems will radically change the price as well as the quality of medicines. Throughout history, medical schools have been imparting knowledge that is not sufficient to equip doctors for functioning in the new age of data science & technology. But by including topics like Mathematics, Statistics, Data Analysis and Tools etc in the syllabus of medical institutions, the efficiency of the doctors will reach a whole new level and they can successfully offer prescriptions based on hardcore analysis of data rather than intuition-based medicines and this will definitely benefit the patients and the quality of healthcare provided. According to one survey over 230,000 medical professionals are currently being trained in Big Data, Hadoop and Data analysis and this number are all set to become 1 million very soon.

1. 1. An AI successfully diagnosed a woman's medical condition in about 10 minutes by comparing her genetic data with 20 million clinical oncology studies and outperformed a team of skilled human doctors. But this does not imply in any way whatsoever that robots can take the place of human doctors. But by providing a huge quantity of medical information and by utilising advanced algorithms AI can turn human doctors into super-efficient professionals. Data drove medicine makes use of the vast repertoire of genomic, clinical, imaging and molecular data and with the help of complex algorithms which can automatically function by gathering knowledge through a recurring chain of enquiries, the entire process can be executed on computer hardware that is cheap & easy to afford. This will enable doctors to search through billions of database records to come up with effective solutions to medical problems, thus what would have taken years for humans to do can now be done in a matter of mere minutes with the help of this technology.

1. The Human Genome Project's objective was to effectively identify all the human genes by gathering DNA from countries throughout the world. It gave rise to a large number of similar projects with an increasing number of research institutes worldwide that have expertise in DNA sequencing and a research plan to get to the genetic basis of illnesses and diseases. The computing abilities and the amount of data generated by it have increased considerably since its inception 13 years ago and this has paved the way for data drove medical treatment procedures. There are even institutes today that produce more sequences of DNA in an hour than they would have done in 10 years! This empowers them to multitask and handle 5 or 6 sequencing projects at the same time.

CONCLUSION:

Data science and AI technology have made available a huge quantity of the patient's personal health information in the form of devices attached to smart phones that can monitor the patient's heart rate, calories burned etc. This is like having one's own doctor give medical advice whenever necessary. In the near future if a patient requires medical attention, then his/her detailed online medical history which can contain vital information such as genome sequencing will be easily accessible to his/her doctor who will certainly be making use of an AI helper on their computer to make an effective diagnosis.

It will definitely make healthcare much more competent & can save many more patient lives than before. However, at the end of the day robots can never operate or treat patients instead of human doctors as medical science cannot function without humans because of their sympathetic attitude & humane approach to deal with patients that are not present in the robots at present. But they can play a major role in preventing costly medical errors in diagnosis & treatment which was not possible earlier to such an extent. To sum up, it can be safely assumed that using data science and AI technology in medical science & healthcare can increase the effectiveness & competence of doctors to a level that would never have been humanly possible for them earlier.

Doctors will be equipped with the knowledge of Mathematics & Statistics along with Medical Knowledge which can indeed transform them into super-doctors.