Machine Learning for the Improvement of
Healthcare
Sebastián Gutiérrez Jaramillo
Faculty of Engineering, Universidad de Antioquia
Medellín, Colombia
sebastian.gutierrezj@udea.edu.co
Abstract— As the population continues to grow, medical
care becomes increasingly difficult. Therefore, a lot of research
is done to improve the quality of the healthcare system around
the world, but there is one approach that promises more than
the others. With Machine Learning, some processes of the
medical attention could be not only automatized but improved
in terms of efficiency and accuracy. The major advantages that
can provide this technology are related with analyzing patterns
and linking medical histories with databases. In this way,
collaboration between healthcare professionals and software
engineers is an exceptional option to begin the development of
future healthcare.
Keywords: machine learning, artificial intelligence, analysis,
healthcare, improvement.
I. JUSTIFICATION
Today, everyone has heard of at least one case of ineffective
healthcare, especially in less developed countries. The use of
artificial intelligence tools such as Machine Learning could make
processes cheaper and improve time efficiency. And with
population growth overcoming medical services and staff, many
lives would be saved by implementing automated diagnostics and
smart databases. Therefore, it is a much-needed research that could
improve the quality of life of countless people worldwide and
signify the next step for humanity in terms of technology.
II. OBJECTIVES
A. General
Show the wide possibilities that Machine learning applications
have in medicine.
B. Specific
• Determine the consequences of updating traditional processes
and if they are worth assuming.
• Estimate the costs of implementation and training of the
artificial intelligence tool.
• Present current examples of methods using Machine
Learning in medicine.
III. STATE OF ART
There has been some previous research related to machine
learning for medical purposes. In each of them the disadvantages
of traditional healthcare are exposed, mainly in terms of
inefficiency of time. For example, in an article [1] published by
Stanford University for the New England Journal of Medicine, the
contrast is made of how a patient has to wait for multiple
specialists from different areas to have the time to attend to him
and therefore during that period his illness inevitably progresses.
As explained later in the same article, the possibility of having an
intensive specialist always available to the patient could
considerably improve their hopes of recovery. Now, talking about
how this tool works, one can find an article from the University of
Ljubljana in Slovenia, by Igor Kononenko [2] where he talks about
the ability of machine learning to learn through symbols. Working
with decision trees and decision rules, a program can analyze large
volumes of data and compare final diagnoses with medical
examinations to achieve the precision of an experienced
professional but in a hundredth of the time.
To arrive at a brief explanation of what machine learning is, it
is necessary to consider the contrast of it with traditional
programming. As Isaac Kohane [1] shows, traditional
programming requires an engineer to write in a specific language
giving specific instructions for a program to run correctly, that is,
they need rules established by a person. In terms of medicine, it
would be incredibly difficult to develop a useful program in a
traditional way because medicine is a huge and complex field that
cannot be reduced or compacted into rules. However, Machine
Learning solves several of these drawbacks: first, it is not
necessary for the programmer to write all the code that governs the
software, he only has to establish limits and from there the
program can be self-sufficient; Second, Machine Learning is not
based on established rules as mentioned above, on the other hand,
it can be said that it works as a model that learns through
examples.
Kononenko [2] describes in his work some examples of
algorithms that have currently been tested to measure their
capabilities as applications for complementary medicine. From the
naive Bayesian classifier that uses a specific formula that serves to
determine the probability of a certain event occurring given some
previous conditions, to the R-wizard system that bases its
operation on decision trees, learning with the test method and
error. These and several other programs were compared on
features such as performance, transparency, and detailed
explanations, showing that each has unique advantages but that all
are excellent ways to improve the clinical diagnostic process.
A particularly important aspect related to the implementation
of this technology is its consequences. While it is natural to think
that this could mean a reduction in the total amount of work
available to new healthcare professionals, despite this, Dr. Jeffrey
Dean [1] talks about how Machine Learning can increase the work
of the clinicians. Because this tool can take advantage of the
enormous amount of data and patterns found in the files of many
patients, it can also make predictions with greater precision. In this
way, many more people will be able to treat their diseases in time,
which would be much more difficult without this new technology.
Machine Learning is a tool that allows us to see how artificial
intelligence could mean improvements in different areas of science
and health, and that it is completely possible to implement it
without compromising the employment of professionals in these
areas.
 IV. THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK
The application of machine learning has its potential mainly in
the diagnostic stage of health care. First, it is necessary to think of
this tool as a model, which "can learn the patterns of the health
trajectories of a large number of patients." And this can make it
easier in the future to anticipate events related to the health of a
given patient. In addition, thanks to this pattern analysis, it will
also be possible to approximate details such as: how likely it is that
the patient will return to work after recovery or how quickly his or
her illness could progress. Now that the concept is understood as a
model that interprets patterns, it can be separated into two main
types: supervised learning and unsupervised learning.
Supervised Learning
Supervised learning begins with the objective of predicting a
known outcome or goal. Recurring supervised learning problems
include handwriting recognition (such as handwriting recognition),
image classification of objects (e.g., is it a cat or a dog?), and
document classification (e.g., is it a heart failure clinical trial or a
financial report?). Remarkably, these are all tasks that a trained
person can do well and therefore the computer often tries to
approximate human performance. Supervised learning focuses on
classification, which involves choosing between subgroups to
better describe a new instance of data, and prediction, which
involves estimating an unknown parameter (such as the
temperature in San Francisco tomorrow afternoon).
What might be some examples of supervised learning in
medicine? Perhaps the most common example seen by a
cardiologist is automated ECG (electrocardiography)
interpretation, where pattern recognition is performed to select
from a limited set of diagnoses. In radiology, automated detection
of a lung nodule from a chest X-ray would also represent
supervised learning. In both cases, the computer approximates
what a trained physician is already capable of doing with great
accuracy.
Unsupervised Learning
In contrast, in unsupervised learning, there are no outcomes to
predict. Instead, we are looking for patterns or groupings that
occur naturally within the data sets. This is a more difficult task to
judge and often the value of the outcomes achieved through
unsupervised learning is assessed by asking: Are these new
patterns useful in any way? How could this kind of learning be
used in medicine? Well, given the immense amount of variation
that exists in the most common diseases, predicting their behavior
is very difficult for supervised learning algorithms. However, since
these are mostly heterogeneous groupings of data, unsupervised
learning could be used to look for patterns among the thousands of
data.
One concrete application, as stated in an article by the
American Heart Association [4], would be to apply unsupervised
learning to heart disease, taking a heterogeneous condition such as
myocarditis. One can start with a large group of similar individuals
with unexplained heart failure. One can then perform biopsies on
them and characterize the cellular composition of each sample. For
example, a count of T lymphocytes, neutrophils, macrophages,
eosinophils, etc. would be done. It would then be possible to see if
there are recurrent patterns of cell composition, which, in turn,
could suggest a mechanism and guide the therapies to be explored.
Now, whether the model is monitored or not, there are some
steps that must be taken. First, it is necessary to prepare the
construction of the model by establishing the main task for the
algorithm, and then select the database from which the algorithm
will do the data collection. For example, if the objective of the
model is to determine the patterns of a common disease, the
database could be the medical history of a group of diverse
patients. Next, the model must be trained in its ability to interpret
the data it has collected by performing processes that can be
roughly described as trial and error [1] in order to correct its
interpretations based on parameters set by the software architect in
charge. Finally, the results obtained by the machine learning model
are compared with a proven field reference and thus can ensure
how accurate the program is.
Why is it important to consider Machine Learning for the
medicine of the future? Well, as stated in the Stanford University
article [1] it is concluded that a diagnostic error will occur in
practically all patients' lives at least once. Furthermore, there will
be cases in which it will be critical to give the correct diagnosis at
the right time in order to facilitate treatment and improve life
expectancy in general. Currently, hospital databases are already
mostly digital and tend to continue in this way, thus contributing,
hopefully and unexpectedly, to the growth of databases that are
optimal for training the models of Machine-Learning already
mentioned. And because the accuracy of these algorithms is
directly proportional to the amount of data they have to train and
the number of times their training function is executed, the first
tool is already there waiting for research to continue so that the
number of times these programs are launched to improve medical
diagnosis, both in accuracy and in time efficiency, also grows.
As Benjamin Glicksberg [3] says in his article entitled
Automatic Learning in Cardiovascular Medicine: are we there yet?
There is a need for this tool in cardiovascular medicine, because it
is a field of medicine in which predictions can be especially far-
reaching. And with Machine Learning, data can be analyzed in
much less than half the time, and with the help of specialized
physicians, data developers, and data scientists, you can also
achieve the quality that health professionals would. According to
Kononenko [2], the best way to implement these Machine
Learning tools in today's healthcare system is as a complement to
medical care. In this way, physicians would continue to care for
patients and reach out to their own conditions, while, in addition,
artificial intelligence tools routinely analyze data in search of
patterns in the data corresponding to patients with similar
characteristics and can predict through unsupervised learning
diseases or complications that have some significant probability of
occurring in the future.
Clinician Workflow
Just as many artificial intelligence tools are used in the
entertainment field to make it easier for consumers to find content
they like; they can also be applied in physicians' routines to
facilitate the conditions necessary to treat more patients in a timely
and efficient manner. In what way? In addition to improving the
diagnostic process as mentioned above, machine learning tools can
also help expose relevant information in a patient's medical record
to a physician without the need for multiple clicks. Data entry from
forms and text fields can be improved with the use of machine
learning techniques such as predictive typing, voice dictation, and
automatic summarization.
Not only does this increase the speed at which healthcare
professionals can perform their tasks, it also means that they can
provide more work in less time and will make it possible to
employ new professionals within healthcare institutions. Also
noteworthy are the broad forms of integration offered by Machine
Learning tools for the world of medicine and information
technology, moving towards a more efficient and therefore more
accessible service for all vulnerable populations in the poorest
parts of the world.
 REFERENCES
[1] Rajkomar, A., Dean, J. and Kohane, I., 2019. Machine Learning In
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[2] Kononenko, I., n.d. Machine Learning For Medical Diagnosis:
History, State Of The Art And Perspective. [online]
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<http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?
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2020].
[3] K. Shameer, K. Johnson, B. Glicksberg, J. Dudley and P. Sengupta.
Machine learning in cardiovascular medicine: are we there yet?
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https://heart.bmj.com/content/heartjnl/104/14/1156.full.pdf.
[Accessed: 20- Oct- 2020].
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