The heart of the matter

Irene Chen is a third year PhD student at MIT working to advance machine learning to help doctors and other clinicians improve health care. With her supervisor, David Sontag, and Boston-area hospitals, Chen is taking on the challenge of heart failure. After diagnosis, Chen says, heart failure patients live an average of five years. She wants to develop techniques that will make diagnosis more accurate and improve the treatment and quality of life among patients -- based on their age, past history, lab results, and other factors that can be modeled and better understood using new and more sensitive tools in machine learning.

“The techniques that we have right now just aren’t enough,” Chen says. “Health care has a long history of having disparate impacts on different groups.” Even in today’s clinical trials, she explains, the people serving as test subjects for new drugs do not represent the diversity of the general public. “The hope is that when we have access to a lot more people’s data, more populations will be represented in the machine learning models we can roll out. But we’ve already found that if you’re not vigilant and you’re not careful, you can have an algorithm that does really well for one group, and really badly for another.”

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