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The Human Diagnosis Project project is building the world's "open medical intelligence" system.

The Human Diagnosis Project can develop medical diagnoses with startling accuracy.

The platform combines the knowledge of medical professionals and artifical intelligence.

The goal of the project is to provide open, readily available high-level guidance and training to health care professionals across the globe.

The world-class Mayo Clinic is often the place patients go for a second opinion on a medical diagnosis. It's a good thing they do. According to a report issued by the clinic in 2017, 88 percent of them return home with either a completely different diagnosis or a significantly altered one. Only 12 percent receive confirmation of their doctors' original conclusions.

It's hard to overstate the life-and-death importance of medical misdiagnoses, and with all the artificial intelligence and data collection tools out there, you'd think there might be a way to improve on these statistics. This said, the goal of the Human Diagnosis project, or "Human Dx," (a triple pun their site explains) is to create the world's open medical intelligence system, a "collective intelligence" that can produce vastly improved diagnostic accuracy.

In early March, JAMA published the results of an experiment conducted by Human Dx in cooperation with Harvard, and the results were impressive. Where 54 individual human medical specialists correctly diagnosed 156 test cases 66.3 percent of the time, collective intelligence achieved an 85.5 percent accuracy rate. Nine medical professionals contributed to the collective intelligence conclusions.

Human Dx founder Jayanth Komarneni tells Big Think that, "We can get numbers in the 97th, 98th [percentile], and even — if we have sufficiently large numbers of participants — we can get to super intelligent results. That means that it outperforms 100 percent of individual participants."

About Human Dx

The Human Dx project is a partnership between the social, public, and private sectors — in the U.S., it's a 501 (c)(3) not-for-profit/public-benefit corporation. According to Komarneni, Human Dx's business model is as free of cost to users as possible while still generating enough income to be self-sustaining. There are now nearly 20,000 medical professionals in almost 80 countries contributing. Among Human Dx's partners are, as the company states: the American Medical Association, the Association of American Medical Colleges, American Board of Medical Specialties, and the American Board of Internal Medicine. They're also working in collaboration with researchers at Harvard, Johns Hopkins., University of California San Francisco, Berkeley, and MIT.

Open Intelligence

While diagnoses produced by Human Dx do bring together the opinions of multiple medical professionals, it's far from a simple voting system. It incorporates its own massive data set, machine learning, and artificial intelligence in addition to the input from medical professionals to develop its diagnoses. In designing their collective intelligence, says Komarneni, Human Dx had to first re-think the idea of open intelligence itself.

"We believe that open intelligence is the third form of open knowledge," he explains. The first was open source-protocols such as those on which the internet is based, as well as operating systems such as Linux. These protocols enabled the second form, open content: Wikipedia, data libraries, and so on. Open intelligence combines the first two: "And when you think about A.I. in the context of software," says Komarneni, "it really is code which is smartly delivering content to you based on what you put into the system."

Full Article: https://bigthink.com/technology-innovation/collective-intelligence-diagnosis?rebelltitem=3#rebelltitem3



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