July was an interesting month for artificial intelligence in medicine.
A study from MIT found when human doctors order tests on patients, they factor in something that artificial intelligence is not currently aware of. The authors analyzed charts of about 60,000 ICU patients admitted to Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston.
By looking at physician progress notes with positive or negative sentiments in patient records, they derived scores which they correlated with the number of diagnostic imaging tests that were ordered. When other factors were controlled for, medical data alone did not drive the ordering of tests, but the sentiments of doctors could predict how many tests were ordered.
Pessimistic doctors ordered more testing at first, but later when the patient’s condition was viewed very negatively, they ordered fewer tests.
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