How well can computers connect symptoms to diseases?

A new MIT study finds "health knowledge graphs," which show relationships between symptoms and diseases and are intended to help with clinical diagnosis, can fall short for certain conditions and patient populations. The results also suggest ways to boost their performance. Health knowledge graphs have typically been compiled manually by expert clinicians, but that can be a laborious process. Recently, researchers have experimented with automatically generating these knowledge graphs from patient data. The MIT team has been studying how well such graphs hold up across different diseases and patient populations.