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.”

Watch more videos from MIT: http://www.youtube.com/user/MITNewsOffice?sub_confirmation=1

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is an independent, coeducational, privately endowed university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Our mission is to advance knowledge; to educate students in science, engineering, and technology; and to tackle the most pressing problems facing the world today. We are a community of hands-on problem-solvers in love with fundamental science and eager to make the world a better place.

The MIT YouTube channel features videos about all types of MIT research, including the robot cheetah, LIGO, gravitational waves, mathematics, and bombardier beetles, as well as videos on origami, time capsules, and other aspects of life and culture on the MIT campus. Our goal is to open the doors of MIT and bring the Institute to the world through video.


In This Story: Boston

Boston, officially the City of Boston, is the capital and most populous city of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts in the United States and 24th-most populous city in the country. The city proper covers 48.4 square miles with a population of 675,647 in 2020, also making it the most populous city in New England.

1 Recent Items: Boston

Debating the heat & lakers' postseason ceiling + what are the phoenix suns? | nba today 1

Debating the Heat & Lakers’ postseason ceiling + What are the Phoenix Suns? | NBA Today

In This Story: Massachusetts

Massachusetts, officially the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, is the most populous state in the New England region of the United States.

1 Recent Items: Massachusetts

‘This is insane’: Hospital ripped for ‘woke’ policies on patient conduct

Leave a Comment

We don't require your email address, or your name, for anyone to leave a comment. If you do add an email address, you may be notified if there are replies to your comment - we won't use it for any other purpose. Please make respectful comments, which add value, and avoid personal attacks on others. Links are not allowed in comments - 99% of spam comments, attempt to post links. Please describe where people may find additional information - for example "visit the UN website" or "search Google for..." rather than posting a link. Comments failing to adhere to these guidelines will not be published.