Scary! Google can now predict your death with '95 per cent accuracy'

Do you want to know when are you going to die? Google is telling the death date of people by analysing their medical history. This report was published in a scientific journal -- Nature.

As of now, Google has analysed 216,221 hospitalisations and 114,003 patients, which comes to more than 46 billion data points.

HOW WILL GOOGLE EXAMINE OUR FATE?

Google has an artificial intelligence system that helps in analysing the huge pile of the database and automatically learn and improve.

In May, Google scientists published the medical conditions of a woman who came to a hospital with late stage breast cancer and fluid building in her lungs. While the hospital estimated that 9.3 per cent death chances, Google predicted 19.9 per cent. Google learnt about 175,639 data points on the woman including past health records and her current vital signs.

And, the prediction proved right when she died after a couple of days.
Since Google's algorithm is way faster than the computer, it checks the mortality, hospital re-admission, prolonged hospital stay and discharge diagnosis to evaluate patient's age of death.

We were interested in understanding whether deep learning could produce valid predictions across a wide range of clinical problems and outcomes.

- the researchers wrote.

"These models outperformed traditional, clinically used predictive models in all cases. We believe that this approach can be used to create accurate and scalable predictions for a variety of clinical scenarios."

This data-crunching algorithm can predict the risk of mortality, hospital re-admission, prolonged hospital stay and discharge diagnosis.

It can even help the hospitals in maintaining records.

AUTHENTICITY OF THE ANALYSIS:

The algorithm was 95 per cent accurate as per the data from the University of California San Francisco (UCSF) health system and the University of Chicago Medicine system calls it 93 per cent accurate.

It uses Google AI neural networks which can automatically help in learning and improve itself. Also, it can have an access to all the previous track records of a person which is quite impossible for an organisation to arrange.

OTHER HEALTH PLANS:

The system will soon analyse the medical condition of a patient which will help in knowing the exact symptoms within no time. This will not only help the hospital but also the patient to get the right treatment timely.

AI researchers at Google have also developed algorithms that can predict the risk of heart attacks by analysing retina scans. Google Brain has also joined hands with Indian and American doctors to help diagnose Diabetes Retinopathy, a medical condition in which retina is damaged due to diabetes.

Google's parent company Alphabet is giving healthcare services which can help people detect skin cancer with greater accuracy than what a doctor can detect.
Speaking to Fox News, Dr Mikhail Varshavski questioned the privacy of people and the quality of data.

He raised a very important point saying, "the thing that is worrying for me is what happens with this data and who owns this data?".

"I hope, as a doctor, that these companies use the data to benefit the patients, not the companies themselves,"

- he said.

Since Google is also a part of technology, Dr Varshavski thinks that people cannot always blindly trust the predictions of assessments given by the AI computer.

"Machines make mistakes and sometimes they make mistakes based on faulty data. There needs to be oversight of what these things do," Dr Varshavski added.