Wired Science News for Your Neurons Data-Mining Medical Records Could Predict Domestic Violence
Frederik Joelving
Wired
To a busy emergency physician, a split lip or a case of poisoning is just one of those things they deal with. But to a computer mining the patient’s medical history, it could be the last diagnosis needed to decipher a pattern of domestic violence.
Now, a group of researchers at Harvard University has created the first computer model to automatically detect the risk that a patient is being abused at home. The results were published Sept. 29 in the British Medical Journal.
“It’s a great concept,” said Debra Houry, an emergency physician at Emory University, who was not involved in the research. Although around one in four women experience domestic violence at some point in their lives, she says, the problem often goes unnoticed at a doctor’s visit. “It’s one of those hidden epidemics where they don’t come up to you and disclose the issue.”
In fact, patients often try to hide the abuse, says Ben Reis, a Harvard pediatrician and computer scientist who designed the new computer model. “Abused people actually go to different emergency rooms each time, so that [the abuse] is harder to track.”
To get around this problem, Reis and his colleagues tapped into a public U.S. database containing six years of medical history for around half a million people. They fed a large portion of the database into a simple computer model — known as a naïve Bayesian classifier — which then calculated the abuse risks linked to different diagnoses such as burns, sprains or mental disorders.
(More here.)
Wired
To a busy emergency physician, a split lip or a case of poisoning is just one of those things they deal with. But to a computer mining the patient’s medical history, it could be the last diagnosis needed to decipher a pattern of domestic violence.
Now, a group of researchers at Harvard University has created the first computer model to automatically detect the risk that a patient is being abused at home. The results were published Sept. 29 in the British Medical Journal.
“It’s a great concept,” said Debra Houry, an emergency physician at Emory University, who was not involved in the research. Although around one in four women experience domestic violence at some point in their lives, she says, the problem often goes unnoticed at a doctor’s visit. “It’s one of those hidden epidemics where they don’t come up to you and disclose the issue.”
In fact, patients often try to hide the abuse, says Ben Reis, a Harvard pediatrician and computer scientist who designed the new computer model. “Abused people actually go to different emergency rooms each time, so that [the abuse] is harder to track.”
To get around this problem, Reis and his colleagues tapped into a public U.S. database containing six years of medical history for around half a million people. They fed a large portion of the database into a simple computer model — known as a naïve Bayesian classifier — which then calculated the abuse risks linked to different diagnoses such as burns, sprains or mental disorders.
(More here.)
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