New study presents vision of machine learning leveraged for precision medicine

As a patient recovers from a wound, a doctor may watch over them, monitoring the healing process and prescribing treatments based on the body's responses. But a wide variety of factors including diet, age, or diseases such as diabetes all play a role in healing, and monitoring these variables on a daily basis can be difficult for doctors, especially for chronic conditions. In the face of these challenges, researchers at UC Santa Cruz are envisioning systems that could constantly monitor these complex factors as well as the ongoing responses of the body, and by way of a machine learning algorithm, suggest or even administer treatment. This continuous response to metrics or tests is a form of feedback control--an engineering concept for comparing a variable to a target value. Control theory is commonly used in the engineering of dynamic systems, but much less so by doctors.