How data science is used to improve and develop a new healthcare system
As you may all already know, data science is an interdisciplinary field that extracts the knowledge and insights from many structural and unstructured data using scientific methods, data mining technics, machine learning algorithms, and big data to help make better-informed decisions.
Data science can be applied in every discipline, from the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) to finance trading, smart cities, or even Healthcare -which is the study case of this article-. Have a look!
Source: shapelets.io
Healthcare is a challenging sector, that demands precision, concrete data, knowledge, and long years of experience (school or work). Our current health care system is curative, instead of preventive, which means that you could be potentially sick without having any symptoms until it is too late. One major example of fatal late symptoms that could be avoided by an early prediction is Alzheimer’s.
Alzheimer’s is a neurodegenerative disease that causes dementia, memory loss, communication issue, disorientation, mood swing, lack of motivation, etc. The first symptoms of Alzheimer’s are commonly attributed to ageing or stress, and detailed neuropsychological testing can reveal mild cognitive difficulties up to 8 years before a person fulfils the trial clinical treatment. It has been recently discovered that the first symptoms are usually compensated by our brain, which makes them more difficult to detect only with a physician’s observations.
In other words, early symptoms are not detected in time which led to a permanent disability of the patient. If the early symptoms would have been detected sooner, patients with Alzheimer’s might have received better care. By changing our healthcare to a predictive model, we would be able to save countless lives. Data Science might be a solution to have a smooth transition in the industry, and it could solve problems that we haven’t encountered yet.
Source: shapelets.io
Nowadays, data science can be easily applied to medical image analysis, new medication research and design, predictive analytics and healthcare, tracking …….
Source: https://medium.datadriveninvestor.com/data-science-and-the-healthcare-of-tomorrow-1d781ec49ab7