Crowdsourcing Game Helps Diagnose Infectious Diseases 25
Lucas123 writes "Researchers at UCLA have created an online crowdsourcing game designed to let players help doctors in key areas of the world speed the lengthy process of distinguishing malaria-infected red blood cells from healthy ones. So far, those playing the game have collectively been able to accurately diagnose malaria-infected blood cells within 1.25% of the accuracy of a pathologist performing the same task (PDF). The researchers hope that users of the game can help eliminate the high cost and sometimes poor accuracy of diagnosis in areas like sub-Saharan Africa, where malaria accounts for some 20% of all childhood deaths."
Didn't know a DDX could have the word balls in it. (Score:4, Interesting)
on one hand, gamers have been known to be gracious and kind enough to donate and keep CHild's play running.
On the other hand, gamers are dicks.
I hope this ends well.
applying machine learning? (Score:5, Interesting)
The benefit could be two fold. On one hand a decent classifier could 'help eliminate the high cost and sometimes poor accuracy of diagnosis.' On the other hand if a diagnostician is looking at a blood sample having a classifier give some probability of classification (ie. saying 'this sample is 90% probable to be malaria infected') could help the doctor in their diagnosis.
I'd love to work on that problem. A very quick search of google scholar and citeseer doesn't pop up anything on the subject though, and I don't see any api on the linked site.
Re:Didn't know a DDX could have the word balls in (Score:2, Interesting)
Usually it's not an issue with crowdsourcing. You rely on maybe 100 or more people classifying the same thing correctly, the key point is collective classification. See Citizen Sky for more examples.