Bertalan Meskó from the excellent ScienceRoll blog has uploaded a presentation he gave recently at the Medicine Meets Virtual Reality conference. The presentation, embedded below, is a great overview of how the Web is being utilized in the medical profession.
I was particularly interested in the story of Dr Jay Parkinson, a Web-savvy doctor. He has an impressive website, where he describes himself as "a new kind of physician".
He invites prospective patients to contact him via IM or even videochat; and he has a blog. In one post he clarifies that his Web activities are all about communication, not diagnosis:
"People don’t understand that I use the internet to communicate, not diagnose. I communicate with my patients via the internet and see them in their apartments."
That suggests that we're still at the early age of Web-enabled healthcare, if it's still focused on enhancing communication and not delivering healthcare via the Internet. Still, it's encouraging -- check out Bertalan's presentation below to see how the Web is currently being used in the world of medicine. The activity in Second Life is quite advanced, including "virtual experiments"(!)
See also the Medicine 2.0 blog carnival of web 2.0 and medicine, which has loads of links to check out.
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Now THIS may be dangerous!
Posted by: steveballmer | February 19, 2008 4:21 AMThis is exciting. I do hope he's using encrypted technology for his communications though.
I'd hate have emails chatting about a terminal condition getting sniffed and used for less-than-noble purposes (like a db for checking job and insurance applicants).
Posted by: Tara Kelly (PassPack) | February 19, 2008 7:29 AMThank you for the mention!
I'll soon write a longer post about the dangers of the medical aspects of web 2.0 and the methods we try to fight against pseudoscience and medical quackery.
Posted by: Berci Mesko | February 19, 2008 11:52 AMMedicine 2.0 ?
The current state of the art in medicine 2.0 of today is the automated online CDSS (Clinical Decision Support Systems ). A doctor in a physician in rural clinic could upload medical data , such as lab tests, patients personal infos (age, ethnicity, alcohol consumption, smoker, etc,...) and so forth. These medical data are queried the CDSS from a central server somewhere to give diagnosis (specific cases only and not general) of the situation based on the patient's data which has just been sent thru.
Another type of unstructured medical data is if a suburban clinic with a facility for MRI medical imaging, EEG & ECG readers, etc,... could just take scan the patient and upload those images or EEG/ECG to query the CDSS to give a diagnosis of the current image/EEG/ECG that has just been sent thru based on similar images/EEG/ECG signals that have been stored & index by the CDSS.
CDSS is not new, it has been adopted in clinics and major hospitals over the last 30 years or so, but this time, it is moving into the internet, ie, automated diagnosis anywhere at anytime. CDSS is frequently covered in certain issues of the Journal of Artificial Intelligence in Medicine.
I am currently developing a small CDSS for automated EEG/ECG diagnosis, using DSP (digital signal processing) & machine learning algorithms (this is my hobby). This app is to be deployed at Auckland Hospital's Liver Clinic Unit, for internal use only and not web-enabled. If the staffs at the clinic find it useful, then perhaps I will look to further develop it for commercial use, where I will include MRI image diagnosis (image retrieval classification) system and other specific diseases. There are tons of publications in these areas.
I agree that medicine-2.0 is on the horizon where it will be widely adopted.
Posted by: Falafulu Fisi | February 19, 2008 12:36 PMDear Falafulu Fisi!
It sounds interesting. Could we make contact via e-mail?
Posted by: Berci Mesko | February 19, 2008 11:03 PMBerci,
Yes, I just sent you an email.
Here is a quick useful reference:
Open Clinical decision support systems
There are lots of research materials in the domain of Health Informatics (HI), but they're scattered and published in different journals. Here are some popular ones too.
International Journal of Medical Informatics
Expert Systems with Applications
Signal Processing for Applications in Health-care Systems (Upcoming). Also IEEE & ACM have both got special issues of signal processing in medicine.
I would definitely interested in your work in Web 2.0 for medicine, Berci.
Posted by: Falafulu Fisi | February 20, 2008 12:52 AM