Artificial Neural Networks and Predictive Medicine: a Revolutionary Paradigm Shift
Enzo Grossi · InTech eBooks · 2011
Physicians every day try to accomplish their mission: to give the better care and assistance to their individual patients. They know perfectly that an individual subject is typically “unique”. He or she has specific characteristics, qualities and features, different perceptions of risk value, different values scale, different familiar environments and social roles, all together interacting in a complex way. In other words no subject is equivalent to another, nor even mono-ovular twins. But physician has to take decisions continuously, in front to every single individual, facing always with uncertainty. Will my diagnosis be confirmed later on? Will my treatment work in this patient? Will this patient follow my indications? These are questions that most physicians ask themselves every day. Physicians know that an individual patient is not the average representative of the population. Rather he or she is a person with unique characteristics. What they not always know is that an intervention may be effective for a population but not necessarily for the individual patient. The recommendation of a guideline may not be right for a particular patient because it is not what he or she wants, and implementing the recommendation will not necessarily mean a favourable outcome. The fundamental resource for them still remain their experience and their intelligence in using experience as a guide. In addition, increasing expectations of the highest quality of health care and the rapid growth of ever more detailed medical knowledge leave the physician without adequate time to devote to each patient – who all-too-often becomes a or a file rather than being a person. So, for lack of time, most medical decisions must be based on rapid judgments of the case relying on the physician's unaided memory. Only in rare situations can a literature search or other extended investigations be undertaken to assure the doctor (and the patient) that the latest knowledge is being brought to bear on any particular malady. Continued training and recertification procedures encourage the physician to keep more of the relevant information constantly in mind, but fundamental limitations of human memory and recall coupled with the growth of available and accessible knowledge assures that most of what is known cannot be known by most individuals.