Reflections on the Sano Seminars: Combining Medicine with Data Science 

Data Science and Medicine are two different fields of knowledge and practice, the one very young, the other rather old, do they have something in common to be able to cooperate and benefit from each other?   

Dr Agnieszka Siennicka from Wroclaw Medical University, who is involved in the realisation of the training grant HeartBIT_4.0 (Application of innovative Medical Data Science technologies for heart diseases) shared her experience of building communication between Data Science and Medicine during the Sano Seminar, 13. O2. 2023.   

One of the main considerations of Agnieszka Siennicka is that Medicine actually has some complex data to analyse means there is a job for Data Science here. As a matter of fact, doctors collect many parameters indicating patients’ conditions, and any healthcare system has a great number of patients, so there is numerous data to be explored. The problem is… medicine never designed patients’ information in ay to be understood by many people. There always was one doctor who needed to understand and make conclusions. This means that contemporary databases (or any other types of data collection)) in medicine are not very complete and suitable for analysis from a data scientist’s perspective. Obviously, data scientists should teach medics how to collect information, but it is not the only problem. Medics, in their turn, should help data scientists with understanding what kind of regularities or patterns in medical data they need to look for. So, there is plenty of work to be done in a sense of communication.    

In doctor Siennicka’s project, the communication between medics and data scientists was finally established. The team concentrated its attention on a subgroup of patients who were repeatedly hospitalised and was awarded by revealing of some common patterns in the medical records of this subgroup. The knowledge about those patterns has a positive perspective to improve the healthcare approach to patients from this subgroup.   

This was a short summary of Agnieszka Siennicka’s presentation, the full presentation is available on Youtube:  

You are invited to Sano Seminars – every Monday on 2 PM CET we organize the webinar dedicated to the computational medicine field.