Building a shared vision for early detection and diagnosis

On February 8 the van der Schaar lab will host the first of two clinician roundtables on the critically important topic of early detection and diagnosis (ED&D), as part of its ongoing clinician-oriented Revolutionizing Healthcare engagement series.

ED&D is practically unrivaled in terms of the sheer potential that can be unlocked through even incremental advances: being able to finally achieve a meaningful increase in early diagnosis rates can can help achieve large improvements in survival rates.

Within the healthcare ecosystem there are many stakeholder groups, each of which has a specific set of needs with regard to ED&D. These groups include patients, primary and secondary care clinicians, radiologists, epidemiologists, geneticists, clinical researchers, and policymakers—as depicted in the figure below.

Expertise is somewhat fragmented across the area of ED&D, and an integrated view is needed across disciplines. Machine learning can potentially help build bridges by distilling insights and helping produce a range of analytics. This is something we plan to address through our upcoming Revolutionizing Healthcare sessions.

In our upcoming roundtable we will be joined by experts representing many of these perspectives, including general practice, epidemiology, multi-disciplinary research, and hospital medicine. Applying these broad perspectives, together we will explore some of the key challenges in ED&D and seek insights into how we can potentially work these into a single shared vision.

Topics we will discuss with our clinician panelists include:
– Key opportunities for machine learning in ED&D
– How ED&D tools can fit within a broader framework of machine learning for healthcare
– Types of data needed to inform machine learning tools for ED&D (and the challenges involved)

During these sessions we will examine ED&D primarily through the lens of cancer as a representative disease model, with applications to chronic or progressive diseases in general (for example, cardiovascular diseases, respiratory diseases, and many others).

Our second roundtable on ED&D will be held on March 10. In this session, we will present an updated vision of machine learning for ED&D, incorporating insights gleaned from the February 8 roundtable.

Both sessions will include opportunities for audience members to share and discuss their experiences, questions, and opinions with our panel. If you are a practicing clinician and would like to join us live for these sessions, feel free to sign using the link below.

If you are not a practicing clinician, you can find all of our Revolutionizing Healthcare sessions on our lab’s YouTube channel.