MIT computer scientists are hoping to accelerate the use of artificial intelligence to improve medical decision-making, by automating a key step that’s usually done by hand — and that’s becoming more laborious as certain datasets grow ever-larger.
The field of predictive analytics holds increasing promise for helping clinicians diagnose and treat patients. Machine-learning models can be trained to find patterns in patient data to aid in sepsis care, design safer chemotherapy regimens, and predict a patient’s risk of having breast cancer or dying in the ICU, to name just a few examples.
Typically, training datasets consist of many sick and healthy subjects, but with relatively little data for each subject. Experts must then find just those aspects — or “features” — in the datasets that will be important for making predictions.
This “feature engineering” can be a laborious and expensive process. But it’s becoming even more challenging with the rise of wearable sensors, because researchers can more easily monitor patients’ biometrics over long periods, tracking sleeping patterns, gait, and voice activity, for example. After only a week’s worth of monitoring, experts could have several billion data samples for each subject.
In a paper being presented at the Machine Learning for Healthcare conference this week, MIT researchers demonstrate a model that automatically learns features predictive of vocal cord disorders. The features come from a dataset of about 100 subjects, each with about a week’s worth of voice-monitoring data and several billion samples — in other words, a small number of subjects and a large amount of data per subject. The dataset contain signals captured from a little accelerometer sensor mounted on subjects’ necks.
In experiments, the model used features automatically extracted from these data to classify, with high accuracy, patients with and without vocal cord nodules. These are lesions that develop in the larynx, often because of patterns of voice misuse such as belting out songs or yelling. Importantly, the model accomplished this task without a large set of hand-labeled data.
“It’s becoming increasing easy to collect long time-series datasets. But you have physicians that need to apply their knowledge to labeling the dataset,” says lead author Jose Javier Gonzalez Ortiz, a PhD student in the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). “We want to remove that manual part for the experts and offload all feature engineering to a machine-learning model.”
