Machine Learning towards Precision Medicine

Medicine is complex. Correlations between diseases, medications, symptoms, lab data and genomics are of a complexity that cannot be fully comprehended by humans anymore. Machine learning methods are required that help mining these correlations. But a pure technological or algorithm-driven approach will not suffice. We need to get physicians and other domain experts on board, we need to gain their trust in the predictive models we develop. Elsevier Health Analytics has developed a first version of the Medical Knowledge Graph, which identifies correlations (ideally: causations) between diseases, and between diseases and treatments. On a dataset comprising 6 million patient lives we have calculated 2000+ models predicting the development of diseases. Every model adjusts for ~3000 covariates. Models are based on linear algorithms. This allows a graphical visualization of correlations that medical personnel can work with.