WiDS Maastricht Conference 2022 - Opportunities and challenges in data science for healthcare
Data science is a booming business. Every year thousands of algorithms (if not more) are developed for all kinds of purposes, ranging from social media to grocery shopping. The same is happening in healthcare; data science is booming there as well in healthcare research. Here technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) can be used for many purposes that can generally be classified in three aspects of healthcare: 1) prevention, 2) diagnosis, and 3) treatment. AI can aid in prevention by providing tailored advice to improve an individual’s lifestyle and thus reducing risks of disease. In diagnosis, AI can help by automatically analyzing medical images to identify disease. And in treatment AI help physicians offer patients personalized treatments or help them find the most suitable treatment for a specific disease. Despite these many opportunities, it remains a challenge to actually implement AI into the clinic. Even when patients would clearly benefit from the algorithm. In this presentation, I will describe scenarios in which AI could make a big difference in healthcare and will discuss with the audience which challenges we still face.
Dr. Rianne Fijten is an assistant professor in the Clinical Data Science department of Maastricht University. She defended her PhD thesis in 2017, which revolved around building AI models to diagnose disease based on biomarkers. In 2017 she moved into the healthcare field and has since been actively working at implementing clinically relevant models into the clinic. Her work includes developing clinically relevant AI models, developing decision aids and decision support systems for patients and doctors, implementing those in a clinical setting, and finally evaluating the effectiveness of these tools.