“Humans today live a lot longer than they used to. That’s great news, but as modern medical advances are giving patients second chances at living normal lives, end-of-life care continues to be a difficult thing to plan,” Mike Wehner reports for BGR. “Forecasting when someone will die is an extremely challenging and often uncomfortable thing, but Stanford researchers have trained an AI to be able to predict death with incredible accuracy, and it could revolutionize end-of-life care for patients who are reaching their ends.”
“The goal is to better match patient (and family) wishes with an accurate timeline of an individuals final months, weeks, and days, while affording them the opportunity to plan ahead for the inevitable,” Wehner reports. “The work is titled Improving Palliative Care with Deep Learning, and it’s currently available online.”
“Inaccurate predictions from doctors can create unwanted consequences, such as patients spending their final days in a hospital ward rather than at home, surrounded by loved ones,” Wehner reports. “By removing the human predictive element from the equation — which may be influenced by emotion and optimism — the algorithm takes a calculated look at the data and makes a call based on facts. The result is a much more accurate prediction of death that allows the patient and their family to plan for the best, most comfortable send-off.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Dude, you’ve been EOL’ed. Cheerio, ol’ chap!