Nature Communications (Aug 2020)

Improving the accuracy of medical diagnosis with causal machine learning

  • Jonathan G. Richens,
  • Ciarán M. Lee,
  • Saurabh Johri

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-020-17419-7
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 11, no. 1
pp. 1 – 9

Abstract

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In medical diagnosis a doctor aims to explain a patient’s symptoms by determining the diseases causing them, while existing diagnostic algorithms are purely associative. Here, the authors reformulate diagnosis as a counterfactual inference task and derive new counterfactual diagnostic algorithms.