What Is the Impact of the Doctor’s Gender?

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In a recent paper published in JAMA Internal Medicine, the authors reported that patients treated by female physicians had significantly lower mortality and readmission rates compared with those cared for by male physicians. Even though the study did not provide the reasons of such a difference, the authors noted previous evidence suggesting that female physicians would be more likely to provide patient-centred care, psychosocial counselling, and evidence-based medicine, while their male colleagues would be less cautious when managing more complicated patients.

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Artificial Intelligence Achieves Dermatologist-Level Skin Cancer Classification

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A team of researchers from the Stanford’s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory employed a deep learning algorithm developed by Google (GoogleNet Inception v3 CNN architecture) to create an automated system for the classification of skin cancer. The algorithm that was already able to recognise objects from 1.28 million images, was trained using nearly 130,000 clinical images of more than 2,000 diseases. In a paper published on Nature, the researchers described how they employed over 370 biopsy-confirmed images to assess the artificial intelligence performance against 21 board-certified dermatologists. Notably, the algorithm matched the sensitivity and specificity of the experts’ opinion in classifying correctly keratinocyte carcinomas, melanomas classification and benign lesions. The new system paves the way of accessible and cost-effective applications that will enable recognition of skin lesions with the use of such devices as smartphones.

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Image Credit: Stanford/Matt Young

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Study finds 33% of adults recently diagnosed with asthma do not have it

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A new study from the Ottawa Hospital Research Institute, which was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, found that 33% of adults recently diagnosed with asthma did not have it. Over 90% of them were able to stop their asthma medications.

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